Subject: Re: oldBSD and slow boot
To: Wenchi Liao <wliao@midway.uchicago.edu>
From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr>
List: port-i386
Date: 03/03/1999 11:43:15
On Mar 2, Wenchi Liao wrote
> I'm trying to install 1.3.3 on a gift laptop. The laptop is a dell
> latitude 450 xp with 23M of ram. It had a dos system, but I had sysinst
> take the entire drive for netbsd's use.
> 
> Booting from the floppy takes an incredibly long time. After reading
> the floppy, the kernel detects the cpu, memory, bus, and ports. All of
> this is done at a fair pace (no more than 10 seconds) The kernel then
> detects the hard drive at wd0, finds the geometry and size of drive,
> and freezes for about 5 minutes. Then a line about npx0 at a port using
> exception 16 and the rest of the boot process (about 10 seconds again).
> This happens if I boot off of the installed kernel as well.
> 
> What is going on?
> 

Maybe it's going in some kind of dose mode, with reduced clock. This may
confuse NetBSD's timing functions.
See if disabling power management in the bios helps.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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