Martmn Coco wrote: ... >> The oddity is you have the flash on the SECOND disk channel. That >> should work, but a buggy BIOS might get in the way. >> > > I tried to move it to the first channel, but the speed problem was still > there when booting:
bah. :) ... >> I see you have a P4. Could the heat sink have fallen off/not been >> mounted properly? Supposedly, the P4 will slow itself down when it >> overheats. IF the heat sink were not on at all (or a tiny air gap >> existed), the thing would probably reach critical temp within a couple >> seconds of power-on, and slow to an absolute crawl. The kernel is >> loaded by the BIOS, so until the kernel was completely loaded. At that >> point, OpenBSD would be halting the processor when it was idle, and it >> would probably stay cool enough to keep running at respectable speed. ... > It is a really good theory :), but as I mentioned before, the install on > this machine went flawlessy, this meaning that when we boot from the > floppy, no speed issues were encountered. We only get slow speeds when > booting from the CompactFlash. yeah...unless the heat sink fell off between install and reboot. Yeah, I'm REALLY Stretching there... >> Assuming those two ideas are not worth they electrons they were written >> on, next test would be to try an ordinary HD in this machine. I'm still curious about this...but I am not sure what the answer would tell me at this point...well, I guess if this is slow, I say "broken BIOS!"...if it is fast, sounds like what TedU was describing. >> Next thing I'd like to see is a running commentary on what's on the >> screen at, say, every five or ten minute intervals, so we can get some >> idea where the slow-down is, and what is going on in the machine at each >> point. Booting is fairly complicated, a combination of ROM, boot >> loaders, OS and hardware...lots of places for things to go wrong. >> However, never heard of this one before... >> > > I'm not sure of what you mean by this. EXACTLY what you provided... > When you boot the box, first the > boot> prompt takes a while to appear. Even the part that says using > "disk 0 partition 3" (or something like that) is slow. When you get to > the boot> prompt, and you hit enter, you start to get the "/-\|..." > progress indicator, going reeeeally slow, but one can tell that some > progress is being done, and that is why we left it to see how much it > took to boot. For 55, 56 minutes, it's the same thing, and then the > kernel is load and everything seems to start to work fine. The speed > issue seems to disappear, so it's definitely a BIOS thing or something > like that. yes, that's what I wanted to know. What I was curious about was did the kernel load quick but the /etc/rc run slow? stuck fsck'ing on a big flash disk? But no...you decribed it clearly, it is obviously having trouble of some kind reading the kernel via BIOS...that's what it's doing with the twirly. > I will use this CompactFlash in the VIA System to move on with the > upgrade, and will try to do some more tests, but I really don't know how > could I continue testing, other than upgrading the mobo's firmware (it's > a Gigabyte board), but I really don't think that will do the trick. Eh, when things go strange, upgrade the BIOS. It rarely fixes things, but you feel silly when it actually does. And obviously, it is a BIOS-ish issue. Might want to try a different brand flash module, or even a PCI IDE interface card, just to get a different connection to the existing one. YEARS ago, machines used to have "fast" and "slow" modes of operation. some had a "smart" mode, which was supposed to get around the problems some copy protection had when running on a faster-than-expected computer. I thought of this with your problem, but I think those systems ran slow when the BIOS accessed the /floppy/, which you say works fine, not the hard disk, which you are having problems with. And I don't recall seeing that option in the last many years...though I don't look for it, either. Relatively recently, I had a complaint of a "very slow" computer...dug around for viruses and spyware, blew away the HD, installed OpenBSD, and that was slow, too. After way too much time, I noticed the BIOS speed was set to "compatable"...which was Dell's way of turning a 333MHz Celeron into an 80286. But since "compatable" sounded "good", I looked at that screen probably half a dozen times until I saw that it's alternative was "fast"... ooops. :) That does it, I'm out of ideas. :( Nick.
