Re: FreeBSD 6.x and HP?

Pete wrote:
> Hey there,
> 
> I've been having a rather unusual, but very annoying issue with HP DL140 
> G3 Servers and FreeBSD. I thought I might give the mailing list a try to 
> see what I can find and whether anyone else has had similar issues. When 
> trying to install FreeBSD 6.x AMD64, as these boxes look to have the 
> Woodcrest core Xeon CPUs (5100-series), which support EMT64T, I have 
> encountered the following issues.
> 
> When using FreeBSD 6.1, I can't even get as far as sysinstall. The 
> server tends to hang when initializing the drives just before it enters 
> into the usual setup utility. When using FreeBSD 6.2, I can get into 
> sysinstall, however, I get as far as configuring the slices and starting 
> the install. After this has been done it begins extracting the data into 
> the root directory, the machine then hangs. I don't believe it to be a 
> hardware fault within a single machine as I have tried with a total of 3 
> of these machines with the same configuration.
> 
> My original thoughts were with the LSI RAID controller I have in the 
> machine. However, If I use the i386 FreeBSD 6.2 CD to install, the 
> installation completes fine, the server reboots and comes up normally. 
> No issues with drives, etc.

So you are trying to install FreeBSD-AMD64? Hum. FreeBSD was first OS to support 
the AMD64 AFAIK. This has been working for a long time.

Does your bios have a setting to enable/disable 64 bit mode?

Did you check this setting in your bios?
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-amd64/2006-July/008613.html

You don't want 4 gigs of memory it that is what you have. Pull out a stick or 
add a stick. Download/burn/Pop in a Ubuntu AMD64 CD. See if that comes up fine. 
If that works, try a snapshot release of "current", but I don't think there is 
magic in 7.0 that 6.2 does not possess in this case.

Its going to be something simple.