Michael-John Turner wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 01:18:41AM -0400, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
>> Before, I would get random hangs while sysinst was unpacking the 
>> tarballs.  Now I can't even get sysinst to come up.  The system is 
>> hanging up at:
>>
>> root file system type: ffs
> 
> I had a similar problem on a SPARCstation 10 which was caused by faulty RAM
> (the machine would panic when untarring the sets). Can you try a boot with
> diagnostics on? Perhaps that'll point to a faulty SIMM (a fault that isn't
> tickled by Solaris 10).

This machine doesn't kernel panic.  It was just locking up hard.

> I do remember issues with NetBSD on Blade 100s with certain PROM versions,
> but I don't think they prevented installation, only the use of USB
> keyboards and mice.

This machine is running with a serial terminal.  I just watched the 
machine boot, and I noticed that during the boot, it also produced the 
error:

aceride0:0:0: lost interrupt
	type ata tc_bcount: 512 tc_skip: 0

It does it a few times during boot.

Peace...  Sridhar