# FreeBSD 9-RELEASE Installer hangs



## iainnitro (Feb 12, 2012)

Greetings:

I am working on installing FreeBSD 9-Release on my system and the installer hangs right at the menu screen.  The menu does not even get loaded fully.

My System is as follows:

I have an unknown ASUS video card PCI-E (plan to replace it this month, this one is a stopgap.  It works with all Linux distros I have tried).

Gigabyte GA-M68MT-S2P mainboard (nforce 630a chipset)
AMD Phenom II X4 860
4 GB RAM
Sony DVD-RW
Seagate 1 TB SATA hard drive

I have checked the BIOS settings and found that the system is NOT setup for SATA RAID.

Would appreciate any help in getting this to work.

Thanks,

Mike


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## jb_fvwm2 (Feb 12, 2012)

Installing from thumbdrive (memstick img) or dvd? Disabling firewire in bios? usb or ps/2 keyboard? Temporarily using onboard video if any? is the DVD sata or ide? (Clueless to reply to your replies though, I have mostly just upgraded not initially installed, beyond sysinstall with disks, ever.) Which reminds me, are you using the v9 installer or the v9 legacy sysinstall application? ( Maybe a clueless on my part question also...)


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## iainnitro (Feb 12, 2012)

Thanks jb_fvwm2 for the reply!  I suppose some of that would be helpful.  The whole system is SATA (so both my hard drive and DVD-RW are SATA drives).  I have not tried to use the onboard video because it is normally X-Windows unfriendly.  The video card that is currently installed seems to be okay with all distros of Linux I have thrown at this machine.

The install disk is the AMD64 ISO DVD.

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks,

Mike


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## iainnitro (Feb 13, 2012)

Hey ALl, just an update.  The video card is an ATI Radeon X300 made by ASUS.  The other hardware in the system is an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 and a Firewire 400 card (VIA chipset).  The FreeBSD installer hangs at the time it is drawing the install menu and just for kicks tried the PC-BSD 9 disk and it hangs at the BIOS Drive C:  message.  The machine is definitely got something installed that is causing the CD Loader to puke.

I do have a list of the hardware verbatim from lshw on the Linux installation that is currently running on this box.

BTW:  Plan to change the video card to a NVIDIA Quadro FX1800 in the next couple of weeks.

AGAIN, hope someone can help, as I REALLY want to run FreeBSD again.


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## jb_fvwm2 (Feb 14, 2012)

There was(is) a firewire (v9) workaround, but if you can temporarily remove the card AND disable it in bios both, it MAY fix it. No guarantees though.


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## iainnitro (Feb 14, 2012)

*S*o after *Free*BSD is installed, the firewire card will be okay?

I have not a problem removing it temporarily... but definitely need it later on.  Use it with my camcorder quite a bit.

Thanks,

Mike


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## iainnitro (Feb 14, 2012)

*O*kay, no difference with or without fire card installed.  Not sure how to describe the hanging, but the menu is transposed over the loader information.  Obvious I can not get a screen grab, but the menu is on top of the messages from the CD Loader and the cursor just sits in the bottom left corner blinking indefinitely.


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## jb_fvwm2 (Feb 14, 2012)

Install v8, use its sysinstall to upgrade-in-place to v9? Maybe easier to figure out how to load some ko that may be missing for the install CD before it starts the install program geom_mbr.ko geom_bsd.ko geom_label.ko. Remove the hard drive to install from another machine? Use the usb memory stick image instead?  
Sorry to just mention terse, unobvious, difficult methods[1] , but I've only basically ever upgraded-in-place (sometimes very unconventionally, in ways probably useful to some on the forum, but I've no time to put together anything exact enough beyond posts I've made...) since v5.
[1] difficult unless they work.  Then they have proved useful.


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