>From: "Tom T. Thai" <tomthai@future.net>
   >
   >sync;sync;reboot causes the system to pass the sync phase but hang at
   >reboot phase.

   I have been seeing this happen intermittently on both a VAX and an
   i386 system recently.  Sometimes it hangs immediately, sometimes just
   after "Syncing disks..." sometimes after "Syncing disks...done".
   Sometimes it makes it all the way.

   I was seeing this a lot on the VAX over the past 2 weeks or so, and
   suspected it was a port-specific problem.  It hasn't happened much (or
   maybe at all?  I'm not sure) since I stopped netbooting the machine
   and started booting it from local disk.

I am seeing this sort of thing on a Sun sparc IPX.  The odd thing is that
a SS1 with nearly the exact same version of NetBSD doesn't do this.

The IPX always locks after the 'Syncing disks....' message.

   The i386 machine where I just started seeing this problem (after
   upgrading to -current from 8/30) is a diskless machine.

   >  Hypothesis: I need to installboot the 1.2G bootstrapping
   >files?  If this is so, when I 
   ># installboot /usr/mdec/biosboot.sym /dev/rsd0a
   >installboot: open raw partition RW: Device busy
   >
   >Should I be in single user mode to do this?  The system seems to run fine
   >(so far) with 1.0A bootstrapping codes.

   I just upgraded my boot blocks on the server.  My guess is that you
   couldn't open the raw partition because your system was at securelevel
   1.  Try it from single-user mode.  I was able to installboot from
   multi-user mode but I have "options INSECURE" in my kernel config.

   Cheers,
   entropy

   --
   entropy -- it's not just a good idea, it's the second law.




Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org   http://anduin.eldar.org