[9fans] Help needed - Boot Failure...

[9fans] Help needed - Boot Failure...

[Lyle Bickley]

I am new to Plan 9 - so I started introducing myself to it with the "live CD" running on an older industrial single board computer (Celeron). Everything worked as expected - including the install.

Given those good results, I decided to create a server. I grabbed an older Supermicro Server which seemed to have all the major components I needed to boot and have video:

Video: ATI Rage XL
Ethernet: (2) Intel Pro/100 ports
CDROM as master on secondary
Dual Pentium III 933MHz, 1GB ECC RAM
PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse (3 button Logitech)
ATA and SCSI  HDD

Upon booting the "live CD", I got the following:

PBS1...
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
ELCR: 0E00
pcirouting: 8086/1229 at pin 1 irq 164
pcirouting: 8086/1229 at pin 1 irq 164

Then the system froze. The only way to get out of the hangup was to reset.

I tried changing a few BIOS parameters related to I/O interrupts - but that didn't change the error condition.

The BIOS on the motherboard was an early edition - so I decided up update it to the latest BIOS.

After updating the BIOS and setting all the BIOS parameters appropriately, I tried booting the Plan 9 "live CD" again. This time I got the following:

PBS1...
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
ELCR: 0E20

At this point, the system froze.

I don't know enough about where to find help for this kind of problem online - I suspect that the ELCR messages describe an error or status condition(?).

I'd appreciate some guidance in tackling this problem...

Thanks in advance...

Cheers,
Lyle
--
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
http://bickleywest.com
"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"

Re: [9fans] Help needed - Boot Failure...

[erik quanstrom]

> Video: ATI Rage XL
> Ethernet: (2) Intel Pro/100 ports
> CDROM as master on secondary
> Dual Pentium III 933MHz, 1GB ECC RAM
> PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse (3 button Logitech)

nice mouse.

> ATA and SCSI  HDD
>
> Upon booting the "live CD", I got the following:
>
> PBS1...
> Plan 9 from Bell Labs
> ELCR: 0E00
> pcirouting: 8086/1229 at pin 1 irq 164
> pcirouting: 8086/1229 at pin 1 irq 164
>
> Then the system froze. The only way to get out of the hangup was to reset.

i'm hoping that there's good news here.  while
there are many reasons the system can hang at this
point, i believe the most common one is a disagreement
with intel ide.  can you tell me what southbridge this
machine has?  i believe i've got a fix for ich0-10.
i've verified that it works on at least one ich5 and
one ich7r machine that were previously broken.
(note: ich7-ich10 parts are often ahci capable;
i think ahci mode is preferrable anyway.)

it's on sources as contrib/sd (for the kernel, see
contrib(1)) and contrib/9load-e820 (for 9load).
if your non-working machine is pxe capable, you
should be able to pxe boot the nonworking machine
from the working machine. unfortunately i don't
have a how-to-pxe guide. the information is all
in the manpages see ndb(8). and you'll need to run
ip/dhcpd and ip/tftpd.

if your having trouble (as i suspect you might with
these random and vague hints), please contact
me off list.

- erik

Re: [9fans] Help needed - Boot Failure...

[Bela Valek]

Hi,

If Erik's fix works for Lyle's installation, I suggest that you
include it in the distribution.

Greetings: Bela (the annoying "include it in the distrib" guy)