IBM Blade Center - FreeBSD on HS20 type MTM 8832/N1X

From: Andrea Brancatelli <andrea_at_brancatelli.it>
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 10:52:00 +0100
Hello everybody.

Had a nice Xmas holidays? Hope so.

I recently started working in a new company where I'm trying to evangelize 
FreeBSD. I succesfully got the internal proxies switched to FreeBSD and 
started to gain some credibility, so yesterday I got a free blade from their 
BladeCenter just for me to experiment with FreeBSD and such.

So I popped in the FreeBSD CD-Rom (the mini-ISO) to install FreeBSD 6.0 on 
this nice machine but it didn't work out.

Here's the symptoms... when booting from CD the CD boots regulary, then the 
"searching for Kernel" part comes in, the whirl starts spinning and 
everything stop. I mean, it doesn't stop, it keeps spinning and spinning and 
spinning and spinning, but without doing anything. If I take the CD out of 
the drive it returns and error complaining it can't find the Kernel and 
asking me where it should look for it.

I don't have a kernel in my pocket so if it doesn't find the one on the CD I'm 
pretty blocked.

Do anyone any interesting idea in how to solve this issue?

The hardware layout, for those who may not know it.

It's a dual xeon machine with 4gb of ram, 2 internal (S-ATA) drives (40gb 
each), one (possibily deactivable) internal Raid controller (deactivating 
this may be a good try, since Debiand refuses to see the drive as well with 
this turned on), a SCSI cdrom and a SCSI  floppy drive.

I don't have any fiber optic channel so the SAN/multipath and everything else 
is not an issue. The keyboard is a PS/2 one, so the USB keyboard isn't an 
issue as well (I'm writing this because I did some digging in the archives 
for similar problems).

Is there anything I should try?

Any idea?

Thanks for any help you may provide.

-- 

Andrea Brancatelli
http://andrea.brancatelli.it/
Received on Thu Dec 29 2005 - 08:59:23 UTC

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