FreeBSD on Prosignia 300

[Jim Reed_3]

Hello Support!

I have spent the past week trying to load
FreeBSD 5.0 current to my old Prosignia 300 eprom (e8) Smartstart release 4.23. That release of Smartstart does not have any Linux setups. Got any ideas to get me going?

It appears to get a partial load going and then dies with a panic message. The FreeBSD organization says to contact you since it is either a rom or Smartstart issue. They claim this release (FreeBSD 5.0) is "stable". I have run both Windows 98se and Linux on this machine before and they both worked fine.

The machine is 90mhz with > 80 megs ram and 2 SCSI drives of each 1 gig.

According to FreeBSD more than enough resourecs to get this going.

Please help me since this is holding up our ebusiness setup.

Thanks, Jim Reed, IT Director
Frame City
Worthington, Ohio
email: jackd@copper.net

[Vince Van De Coevering]

You are probably having a memory issue. Older Compaq servers report ram "incorrectly" (or the os detects it incorrectly depending on who you ask)to the OS at boot time. This requires that you specify the ram before booting the installer.

For freebsd you need to type the following parameter before loading the kernel:
hw.physmem="xxxK" Where xxx is the amount of ram available in the system.

When the Install has finished make sure to add that same line in /boot/loader.conf or the kernel panic will magically reappear!