Re: Can't load kernel, trying to install on a Dell R900.

Mel wrote:
On Thursday 28 February 2008 12:51:10 Nicky Bulthuis wrote:
I'm having 'a lot' of troubles installing FreeBSD on a new Dell R900
from CD. Somehow it just doesn't seem to be able to load the kernel from
the CD.

The machine is turned on with the CD is inserted.
It shows the message of the BTX Loader and then it stops with an error
message:

can't load 'kernel'

At first i figured my CD was broken, so i used a different image. Still
no dice, same error message. I've tried 6.2 (amd64), 6.3 (amd64) and 7.0
(amd64), sadly none of them work.

I've disabled the internal CDrom drive and used an external USB CDrom
drive. I figured, perhaps the internal cdrom drive is incompatible with
FreeBSD. Sadly that also didn't work.

Output from lsdev:

cd devices:
cd0: Device 0x0
disk devices:
disk0: Bios drive C:

What does ls / give? And ls -l /boot/kernel/kernel?

Been a while since I loaded a kernel manually, but I think:
boot -v cd0:/boot/kernel/kernel
should do the trick.

Does any of that give more hints to what might be the problem?
Well, i've made some progress with your suggestions.

First things first, i had already updated the BIOS from version 1.1.0 to 1.1.3, the latest i could find on the Dell website.

"ls /" and "ls -l /boot/kernel/kernel" both give me 'bad path'.
"boot -v cd0:/boot/kernel/kernel" gives two messages, "can't boot kernel" followed by "no bootable kernel"

Using 'ls cd0:/' gives me the cdrom file listing, so that works. I can browse the cdrom directory structure.

I've done 'load cd0:/boot/kernel/kernel', which actually loads the kernel.
I get the 'text[memadres] data[memaddress] syms[memaddress]' messages, and 'lsmod' shows me a loaded kernel.

however, running 'boot -v' doesn't seem to work. It shows me the progressbar "|-/\", make a full circle, but stops right after.

Nicky




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