Booting up gets stuck

[mgb1unc]

I have a newer Dell Studio 1737 laptop with two internal hard drives. The thing is smoking fast with Windows 7 64-bit.

I burnt the ISO at a nice slow speed with IMGBurn. Start to boot from the DVD and the following message appears and goes no further. I downloaded the 64-bit KNOS version, checked to make sure.

Message:

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 1.02
Consoles: internal video/keyboard
panic: free: guard1 fail @ 0xbb797074 from
/user/src/sys/boot/i386/loader/../../common/

Press a key on the console to reboot
---------------------

I wait and wait, nothing. I've burnt 2 DVDs.

After pressing a key to reboot, I got my very first ever blue screen on this laptop. I have *never* had a problem with this laptop.

Any suggestions?

[Kevin McAleavey]

Jun 13, 2010 21:52:39 GMT -5 mgb1unc said:

panic: free: guard1 fail @ 0xbb797074 from
/user/src/sys/boot/i386/loader/../../common/

Press a key on the console to reboot
---------------------

I wait and wait, nothing. I've burnt 2 DVDs.

After pressing a key to reboot, I got my very first ever blue screen on this laptop. I have *never* had a problem with this laptop.

Any suggestions?

Wow. There's a first. Sorry to hear that, and my extreme sympathies! The blue screen part is the strangest part of it all since BSD doesn't do blue screens nor does it even know how. What you're seeing there is a failure of the boot loader itself, the earliest part of the boot sequence. The failure that's occurring is the BIOS relocating the boot part (BTX) above 1 megabyte (technical glitterdom I know, but I like to explain things so that it helps Dell's tech support) which is perfectly normal but for some reason your machine is spitting the bit when it does so. Sadly, this is a problem in the BIOS of that machine itself.

The BTX loader is a basic component of BSD as I said, and that means any loading of BSD (and possibly even Linux) is sending that machine into nanaland. I don't know that there's anything we can do about it since the problem is with Dell's BIOS. I imagine your DVD's are fine and would work on any other machine without a hitch.

What I would *suggest* if your machine is still in warrantee would be to give them a call, tell them what's happening, point their tech support people to where you downloaded the KNOS file from and hopefully let them try it out and see if they can come up with a workaround for you in the BIOS settings of your machine. I'll bet that's possible since I can't imagine Dell (who sells an awful lot of expensive servers) blowing up BSD and possibly risking their high end sales over a BIOS problem.

But sorry to say, what's going on is the BIOS in that machine sending the booter off into outer space without benefit of re-entry. You can always give our 32 bit version a try on there - it should work and is functionally identical to the 64 bit version aside from its 64 bittiness. If *that* won't run either, I'd say Dell has some interesting issues that hopefully didn't carry over into their newer machines. I wish I had a solution for you, but the failure is happening in a core BSD boot driver and not anything we monkeyed with.

[mgb1unc]

Thanks for the explanation, Kevin. I'll look in the BIOS to see if there's anything I might be able to do/change. A few months ago, I used PCLinuxOS LXDE Live DVD on this laptop, and it seemed to work fine. I may try it on another machine.

[Kevin McAleavey]

Jun 14, 2010 9:35:33 GMT -5 mgb1unc said:

Thanks for the explanation, Kevin. I'll look in the BIOS to see if there's anything I might be able to do/change. A few months ago, I used PCLinuxOS LXDE Live DVD on this laptop, and it seemed to work fine. I may try it on another machine.

You're welcome! Just heard back from one of the BSD maintainers who handles the boot code and he says this has happened before with Dell's BIOS and he's doing a workaround for "bounds checking" which he thinks he can have in his code in a couple of weeks for our next release. It'll be one of those "try this" kinda things but any changes to BSD core code have to be approved by the BSD folks before they can be released and thus the delay. Hopefully this will take care of it for you. I'd do the suggested change myself, but it's imperative here that we keep the code BSD did absolutely pure so as to not destabilize something else.