Installer hangs on boot

[maddog39]

Hello all,

Well I finally get a chance to intall PCBSD as I am very excited to use it after testing it previously in VMWare. But the installer just hangs on the "PCBSD Loading system..." screen. I have no idea if its doing something or not, my HDD light is just on constantly, I waited for a few minutes and still nothing happens. Also, when I try to press a key on my keyboard to go into verbose mode, it doesn't respond to me. All I see is a quick flash of one of the LEDs on my keyboard and it sits there. Please help! Im really disappointed that its probably not going to install and I will need linux again..

I read another topic with a similar issue, and the beta version was recommended. But I don't ever use and never want to use beta software. Beta software = more frustrations.

Thanks
-maddog39

[TerryP]

The only time I've had a problem like this, was when I burnt my first coaster that wasn't my error since.

Make sure the MD5s match and I'd say try burning again on good media at an optimum (not fastest) speed.

[maddog39]

I burned the disk with K3b, and it checked the MD5 sums when burning. I've never had a problem burning an ISO in K3b until now.

[maddog39]

Well something just hit me that, last time I tried to install FreeBSD on real hardware it did the same thing, it hung trying to load the installer and kept the HD light on. So I think that BSD just refuses to run on my computer and never will, so im hopeless of getting any BSD fork installed. In case this helps, here is my hardware.

Intel Pentium D 930
1GB (2x512MB) DDR2 667MHz RAM
ECS A19-SLI Motherboard
nVidia GeForce 6500 w/ 256MB VRAM
nForce 4 Chipset - I use the built in sound, and network controllers.

[antik]

... so im hopeless of getting any BSD fork installed.

PC-BSD is not a fork of FreeBSD! It is preconfigured FreeBSD with added functionality and new installer.

[maddog39]

Same difference, the point is it doesnt boot. :/ Are there any work arounds?

[TerryP]

Hey if they re-wrote half the kernel it'd be a fork :-P

Other then the usual nForce4 issues I don't know of any thing wrong with the HDD. Do you know if the IDE/SATA controller is supported ?

[maddog39]

Well this is strange, I just did a successful install of DesktopBSD and of course internet refuses to work. But thats beside the point. DesktopBSD is FreeBSD 5.x and PCBSD is based on 6.x and when I tried installing FreeBSD for the first time, I was trying to install FreeBSD 6.1. I think it has something to do with FreeBSD 6.x.

[dracheflieger]

I didn't see much on the FreeBSD lists other than someone saying that they couldn't get the nve driver to work, meaning that FreeBSD was already installed and they had no NIC card. There are 2 versions of this board (1 and 2)...I would suggest you go to ECS' web page and make sure you have the latest BIOS installed (July of 2006)...have you got RAID turned on in the BIOS?

[maddog39]

I bought the parts in late july-august, so it must have the latest BIOS. I also messed up the model number, its actually a C19-A SLI.

[Edit]
No, RAID is not enabled.