# FreeBSD Installation Problem



## Jreemygear (Aug 30, 2009)

I have been trying to install FreeBSD on my machine since Friday with no luck. I insert the cd and boot from cd. This brings me to the installation menu. I have chosen every option and received one of two scenarios depending on which I choose. I either get something about a GEOM error or, the one that is most prevelant, I get a screen of random characters that are different colors and are scattered about the screen and gray boxes littering the screen in something like a checkerboard pattern.

Can someone please help?

My system is running Win XP Pro as the alternate OS
CPU: AMD Phenom 9850
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 4850
Memory: 4GB RAM
Motherboard: DFI LanParty DK 790FX-M2RS


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## ale (Aug 30, 2009)

What version did you tried?
Can you try the last one (8.0-BETA3)?


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## Jreemygear (Sep 1, 2009)

Well, I tried 7.2 first and received the problem I stated above. I did what you suggested and downloaded the 8.0 BETA3 and now I am met with an "AP#! (PHY #1)" failure and it says Panic y/n [y] and stops.


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## polishdude (Sep 9, 2009)

hey, have you tried switching off acpi at boot? freebsd is not so good with acpi, had problems on installation as well


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## RodLophus (Nov 21, 2009)

Hi!

I have the same motherboard - and the same problem here.

Things I've tried so far:

- Installing FreeBSD 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 and 8.0RC3: same problem.
- Installing FreeBSD 6.x (even 6.9): works fine

I didn't try installing 6.x and updating, because I red on some foruns that the problem will get back as soon as I update the system.

By "same problem" above, I mean:

- Booting with ACPI enabled: at the very beggining of boot messages (sortly after the processor's detais), the kernel starts showing a message (something about ACPI.  It scrolls to fast to read) over and over - until it stops with "kernel panic" and some random flashing characters.

- Booting with ACPI disabled: it boots up, but hangs on "Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/md0".  If I turn verbose boot on, I can see it actualy goes a bit futher and tryies to run "sysinstall".

I also tried to make a custom boot CD, with a custom kernel, removing support to all unnecessary devices (USB, parallel, serial, firewire, scsi, raid, etc), and with root at the CD itself.  It boots and drops on the "choose root filesystem to mount" prompt (this was intentional), but, when I try the "?" command to list root devices candidates, I get an empty list.

Scrolling the boot messages up a little, I could see what I think is the root of the issue: lots of messages like "unable to map interrupt", "unable to allocate interrupt", etc - about all devices.  It detects my ATA and SATA controllers, but shows this message and does not detects any of devices (HDs, CDs) attached to them.

Today, I finally updated my motherboard's BIOS to the last version available at DFI's site.  After that, I spend a morning playing with setup's parameters.  I've even tried to allocate IRQs manually at setup, but the problems is always the same.

So far, I see no mean to make this board work with FreeBSD ( I think FreeBSD doesn't like this board's ACPI controller - but, without ACPI support, FreeBSD is unable to talk with this board about resurces (read "IRQ") allocation.

Does somebody have any clue?

I was also wondering... what may have changed from 6.x to 7.x kernel's to cause this problem?

Thanks in advice!

Rudolph


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## jb_fvwm2 (Nov 21, 2009)

I do not know if it would help, but more devices appeared
when I kldloaded geom_bsd.ko, geom_label.ko, and
geom_mbr.ko (v8).  If you can load those at the
boot prompt "escape to loader prompt" a slight chance
the boot or install can proceed.  I have never tried,
though, a newbie here in that regard.  I have them
placed in loader.conf...


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