Possible workaround for 'BTX halted' error
- From: andrew clarke <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:35:09 +1100
Hi,
I have an old 200 MHz Pentium Pro. A slow machine by today's
standards but my intention was to put a minimal installation of
FreeBSD 7.2 on it (ultimately installing to a CF or SD memory card
using an IDE adapter), turning it into a very basic home office
firewall and not much else.
One of the problems I encountered (which I've also encountered on
other old PCs) was the dreaded "BTX halted" error when attempting to
boot from the FreeBSD install CD:
AMIBIOS (C)1992 American Megatrends, Inc.
(C) 1992 - 1998 Intel Corporation.
BIOS Version 1.00.18.CS1
Intel Corporation VS440FX Motherboard
Serial Number: M04090465
0131072 KB
Press <F1> Key if you want to run SETUP
Hard Disk 0 Installed QUANTUM FIREBALL EL2.5A
CD Loader 1.2
Building the boot loader arguments
Looking up /BOOT/LOADER... Found
Relocating the loader and the BTX
Starting the BTX loader
BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.01
int=00000000 err=00000000 efl=00010246 eip=0002c85b
eax=00000000 ebx=00000000 ecs=00000000 edx=00000000
esi=00000000 edi=00040320 ebp=00093ff8 esp=00093fc4
cs=002b ds=0033 es=0033 fs=0033 gs=0033 ss=0033
cs:eip=f7 f1 85 db 89 c1 89 45-94 74 08 8b 55 18 89 32
89 7a 04 89 4d 98 8b 45-94 8b 55 98 83 c4 6c 5b
ss:esp=91 01 00 00 dc df 09 00-00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 20 00 20 00-60 01 20 00 0b 00 20 00
BTX halted
At this point the machine freezes. Ctrl+Alt+Del won't reset it.
I've seen the same bug crop up occasionally for more than a few years
now (since FreeBSD 5.x, I think). Presumably there's no urgency to
fix it.
Until now the workaround I used was to boot from floppy diskettes (all
five of them) made from the images in the \floppies directory on the
install CD. The FreeBSD installer would then operate normally and
install from the CD. But this is frustrating as diskettes are
obviously terribly slow and often unreliable.
Today by accident I found a much simpler workaround. There's a
freeware program called PLoP Boot Manager that can be used to boot
from CD. I burnt plpbtinnoemul.iso (from plpbt-5.0.4.zip) to CD on
another PC then got the Pentium Pro to boot from it. When I reached
the boot menu I took out the PLoP CD, replaced it with the FreeBSD 7.2
CD and told PLoP to boot from that. FreeBSD 7.2 then proceeded to
boot from CD with no apparent problems.
I've successfully booted FreeBSD 7.2, 7.0, 6.2, 5.4 & 5.3 from CD on
this machine using the PLoP CD as a boot loader. Also a recent
version of the FreeNAS LiveCD. PLoP isn't required to boot the
FreeBSD 4.10 CD on this machine, but the 4.10 CD causes it to freeze
very early on with no messages displayed if I do use PLoP to boot it.
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html
Apologies if this is long-winded, but I haven't seen this information
anywhere else, so I thought I'd pass it on! I hope it helps someone.
Regards
Andrew
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