On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 10:19:16PM +0300, bsduser bsduser wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I had a pentium-pro 100 MHz laying around. To make use of it, I wanted to
> install openbsd 3.4 on it (openbsd 3.4 because that
> was the distro that I have).
Why not use something more modern? Old releases are unsupported, and
hardware support is only very rarely removed from newer releases.
Really, there is no reason not to install 4.5 or a snapshot.
> (...)
> The install went fine (installed all the packages bsd, bsd.rd, base34.tgz
> etc, except the x*.tgz ones, since I will not use X on
> that machine). With NetBSD 4.0 I had a problem before install. It
> was rebooting the machine without any messages or warnings.
> (...)
> Anyway, after installing [OpenBSD], I boot the machine (...). The
> kernel loads fine and begins listing the devices found on the machine.
> At the end it comes to a point where it says:
> (...)
> root on wd1a
>
> rootdev=<hex-num> rrootdev=<hex-num> rawdev=<hex-num>
>
> At this point the machine hangs.
>
> From NetBSD I know that at a point like this, when it says root on wd1a (and
> another msg about the swap device) it starts the rc script. But with OpenBSD
> I do not know if that is the case? (...)
Yes, this is the point at which control is handed over to userland.
> Any hints are welcome.
Resurrecting machines this old is rarely worth the effort. I've done it
a couple of times, for my (poor) students' association, but those were
considerably more powerful machines (PII/PIII). And I'm still not sure
it was a good use of my time. Anyway, you can likely ask around and find
considerably more powerful machines for free.
Additionally, it seems fairly likely that you have bad hardware. Both
OpenBSD and NetBSD crash, after all, although at different moments. You
would do well to test memory and disk before proceeding (memtest86 is
pretty good at testing memory, and can run from a floppy; I can't
recommend a disk testing tool, as I immediately discard any drive
suspected to be bad).
Joachim
