Re: 9.0 Installing issues

Ede Wolf <[email protected]> writes:

> I hope I've picked the proper list for my issue. I am experiencing

Yes, it's a good choice of list.

> difficulties in installing NetBSD 9, as already the initial boot process
> hangs at:
>
> fd0 at fdc drive 0: 1.44MB, 80 cyl, 2 head, 18 sec

That means that the floppy was detected, I think.   Probably what is
hanging is the thing that is probed next after the floppy.

My system has no floppy, but it does have fdc0.  The next line is

acpicpu0 at cpu0: ACPI CPU

> The funny thing, it does not matter at all wether I actually do connect
> a floppy drive to the mainboard or not. The result is the same - it
> boots up to that point. 

I don't find that surprising, once one accepts the theory that the
floppy part is ok and the next thing breaks before printing anything.

> Is there anything I can possibly do to get the installer up and
> running? Maybe any arguments I can pass to the boot menu?

Not sure what you may have missed, but read the man page boot(8).  You
can drop to the boot prompt with space and do

  boot -2

to disable ACPI, or boot -1 to disable multiple CPUs.

You can also do "boot -c" and try to disable drivers.  Sometimes video
drivers are trouble on some hardware.

Also "boot -v" should turn on more output which could provide a clue.

Are you able to boot NetBSD 8?  If so, you might look at the dmesg and
see what comes next.

If the system is running NetBSD 8, you could place a 9 kernel in
/netbsd9 and boot that manually via "boot -2 netbsd9" and see what happens.

Perhaps others will have advice.   Basically this is binary search on
differences and turning up verbosity, until you get to running the
kernel under a debugger from a different machine.  Remote gdb is not
that easy to set up, but is powerful.