freebsd-dev/share/FAQ/TROUBLESHOOTING

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Troubleshooting Tips - or "These are the times that try men's souls"
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The following tips and tricks may help you turn a failing (or failed)
installation attempt into a success. Please read them carefully.
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Summary: Hardware conflict or misconfiguration.
Problem: A device is conflicting with another or doesn't match
the kernel's compiled-in IRQ or address.
Cause: While most device drivers in FreeBSD are now smart
enough to match themselves to your hardware settings
dynamically, there are a few that still require fairly
rigid configuration parameters to be compiled in (and
matched by the hardware) before they'll work. We're
working hard to eliminate as many of these last
hold-outs as we can, but it's not always as easy as
it looks.
Solution: There are several possible solutions. The first,
and easiest, is to boot the kernel with the -c flag.
When you see the initial boot prompt (from floppy or
hard disk), type:
/kernel -c
This will boot just past the memory sizing code and
then drop into a dynamic kernel configuration utility.
Type `?' at the prompt to see a list of commands. You
can use this utility to reset the IRQ, memory address,
IO address or a number of other device configuration
parameters. You can also disable a device entirely
if it's causing problems for other devices you'd much
rather have work. Note that this only affects the
kernel being booted temporarily, it does not "write out"
the information to the kernel so that these settings
are permanantly altered (this would be actually rather
hard). If you reboot, you'll have to make the same
changes again. The goal of the -c utility is to get
you up far enough to be able to download the appropriate
sources and configure and rebuild a kernel more specific
to your needs.
Another solution is, obviously, to remove the offending
hardware or simply strip the system down to the bare
essentials until the problem (hopefully) goes away.
Once you're up, you can do the same thing mentioned
above - compile a kernel more suited to your hardware,
or incrementally try to figure out what it was about
your original hardware configuration that didn't work.
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