# FreeBSD install issues Sunfire X2200 M2



## xcxeon (May 3, 2012)

I have a Sun Microsystems Sunfire X2200 M2. Hardware configuration is as follows:

2x Quad Core 2.7Ghz Opterons
32GB RAM
2x Hot-Swap SATA/SAS Bays connected to ports 0 and 1 on LSI PCI Express 4 port SAS/SATA card.
System board has two SATA interfaces as well.

I received this server earlier today, and began installing FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE on it. Install goes perfectly fine, and everything seems well until the first boot after install, at which point I am dropped into a mountroot> prompt and the system will accept no keyboard input from a physical USB keyboard nor from the build in Sun Lights Out Manager KVM/ip.

I tried installing several times, with several freshly burned copies of FreeBSD 9.0. I also tried both manual and guided partition schemes. Same issue each time. So I decided to try installing FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. CD boots fine, drops me into the installer, goes through the setup and partitioning fine. When it begins to install, it throws an error say it cannot write device node /dev/adxxxx. All of this was done with one 2TB SATA drive installed in bay 0, connected to LSI card port 0, or system board port 0. Neither work, and the drive is fine.

I'm at a loss here as to what the issue may be. Upon googling around, the only information I was able to find involved compiling a custom kernel and disabling ATA_STATIC_ID, which I'd really rather not have to do, since the hot-swap drives in this machine will cause nothing but headaches with static IDs opted out.

Any ideas?


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## xcxeon (May 3, 2012)

Not really a solution to the problem, but I decided to try 8.3-RELEASE earlier out of desperation and it worked fine, so whatever this issue is, it seems to be confined to 9.0. The issue I was having with 8.1 previously was due to 9.0 using GPT and fdisk not clearing the GPT table properly, so that was my fault, I suspect 8.1 would work fine now as well.


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