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From: mbreed@cs.tamu.edu (Michael B. Reed)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Unable to finish booting from floppy
Date: 18 Jul 1996 18:42:42 GMT
Organization: Texas A&M Department of Computer Engineering, College Station, TX
Lines: 31
Message-ID: <4sm0j2$g9n@news.tamu.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: photon.cs.tamu.edu
A couple of weeks back, I replaced a damaged 486 motherboard with a new
one. The new MB uses an Award BIOS (v4.50) and some random revision of
the SiS chipset. Those of you that have seen the 486 motherboards sold
by Micro Center will be familiar with what I've got.
Well, my filesystem got hosed (don't ask), so I attempted to boot from
the installation floppy and tool around with the fixit floppy.
Everything was fine until the kernel finished the device probes.
The last normal message I saw was the MFS message, and just at the point
where sysinstall should have started, the screen became corrupt and the
system suffered a panic. I managed to pick out the words "page fault"
in the trash on the screen; my guess is that this is the "page fault
while in kernel mode" panic string that I'd seen on occasion before.
(In fact, this is part of what kept happening with the old MB.)
I've tried booting with the absolute minimum number of configured
devices, and tried turning off caching and shadowing in the CMOS setup.
No dice - the system fails the same way at the same point. (Either that
or it sees my hard drive twice and maps it as both wd0 and wd1, which
leads to other problems.)
What gives? The system could boot from the hard drive fine, until the
FS died a horrible death. There's not a compatibility problem with the
Award BIOS, is there? (I'd be surprised if there is - otherwise I can't
see how it would have ever worked at all.)
--
-Brad Reed mbreed@tamu.edu http://www.cs.tamu.edu/people/mbreed/
TAMU Prisoner, August 31, 1992 - December 20, 1996