Replying to myself, for the sake of the archives.
List,
I just received a new batch of servers to deploy. Among the lot I have 3 HP Proliant DL360 G3 servers that refuse to run the installation CD. I think this is because HP have switched to Ultra 320 drives and I don't think FreeBSD has caught up with that. I have two 18Gb 15000rpm drives mounted in RAID-1.
The BIOS says "Proliant System BIOS - P31 (03/01/2003)".
I've tried various BIOS options, but the boot always goes like this:
Miniboot 4.1 Attempting Boot From CD-ROM CD Loader 1.01
Building the boot loader arguments Lookup up /BOOT/LOADER... Found Relocating the loader and the BTX Starting the BTX loader
BTX Loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.01 Console: internal video/keyboard BIOS CD is cd0 BIOS drive A: is disk0
inf=0000000d err=00000000 efl=00030006 ... BTX halted
I.e.: it looks like it's when it hunts for hard disks.
I trawled the archives and learnt that people had similar problems on Compaq hardware, although with Adaptec controllers. The solution there was to create a DOS partition on the disk beforehand. I tried this, with no success.
I've tried booting from 4.8-RELEASE, 5.1-RELEASE and the 5.1 miniloader, all with similar results. I also tried booting of an OpenBSD 3.3 CD. It gets a bit further, but when it comes to choosing I for Install, it reports that there are no hard disks available.
It seems like FreeBSD simply hasn't caught up yet. I had a look at the Testdrive machines offered by HP, but they're still running 4.8 on a DL360 G2.
If anyone has some idea as to how to proceed, I'd be really grateful. The only alternative would be to try and install Linux. But I've been unhappy with Linux performance under load in the past (and it's these servers I'm replacing) so it would be sad to continue in that vein.
Thanks for the clues,
Daisuke Koike got me onto the right track by pointing me to http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=61247+63991+/usr/local/www/db/text/2003/freebsd-stable/20030525.freebsd-stable
The thread there talks about disabling a BIOS setting named "Virtual boot device". Unfortunately my BIOS doesn't have that option. I had another look, and found a different option named "Virtual install disk" and this one was enabled. I set it to disabled, rebooted, and FreeBSD booted successfully from the CD-ROM. Hope this helps someone in the future.
Thanks again Daisuke-san.
David
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