Subject: Newbie problems installing NetBSD 1.6.1 on an SS10
To: None <port-sparc@NetBSD.org>
From: Richard Liang <squixy@hotmail.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 07/25/2003 09:24:34
Hi everyone,
I'm not sure if this is the place for a NetBSD newbie to be asking
questions, but I've been having some big problems installing NetBSD 1.6.1 on
an old Sparc 10. The system has 112MB of RAM, a cgsix framebuffer, one
424MB internal HD, one 4GB external HD, and a Sun CD-ROM drive. I am
installing from the multi-cd1 ISO image I downloaded from
ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/pub/NetBSD/.
The installer boots correctly from the CD-ROM, and on startup everything
seems to work okay; it identifies everything correctly (most of the time).
I have two problems. The major problem is that whenever I try to install,
at the partitioning stage, once I've specified partition sizes, the
installer invariably fails at either the disklabel stage or when creating a
new filesystem on rsd1a (my root directory partition, on the internal HD).
The frustrating thing is that it gives different messages at different
times.
The most common failure I get is a message that says
"(esp0:3:0): selection failed; 0 left in FIFO [intr 18, stat 87, step 3]"
followed by many
"esp0: invalid state: 6"
This is often what I get when trying to partition the drive, and sometimes
even during the initial stage of installation, when it is detecting all the
hardware. If this happens, if I try to partition again the installer fails
to see the hard drives.
When I do a "probe-scsi" in the PROM shell, everything seems to work, but
when I do a "test-all" it seems to hang on a line:
"Testing /obio/zs@0,100000"
Anyway, the problem could be as simple as old, failed hardware. When I dug
the computer out of mothballs it had two internal hard drives, both bootable
with Solaris installed. However, somehow the second one died, and I was
forced to remove it. The fact that I get different error messages every
time also makes me suspect that it's bad hardware. However I have read
about people getting similar errors on their Sparcstations, due to something
about tagged queueing (which I don't pretend to understand). I also don't
have a proper SCSI terminator, but as the same setup was working under
Solaris I figured that the Sun drives have internal termination.
Has anyone had similar problems? And can anyone help me?
Richard
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