DesktopBSD 1.6: First Roadblock Is An Interrupt Storm
In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll share a few details about the current state of the Great DesktopBSD Experiment. To refresh, my goal is to load the latest version of DesktopBSD on an old Sony VAIO and get used to my new OS. A lofty goal, yes?
I traded two pints of Diet Mountain Dew for a DVD of the DesktopBSD 1.6 iso. On bootup, things progressed slowly (hey, this thing only has 128 MB RAM), but steadily to the boot menu.
Once I selected the default boot option, things got “interesting”.
“Interrupt Storm Detected on “irq9:” Throttling interrupt source.”
The initialization process continued, but was interrupted every couple of lines by this error. Things were loading normally, albeit slowly with this error popping up more often than not, until I got a graphics error that told me I should probably config my graphics options manually. I can handle that just fine, but I’ve got to get rid of this interrupt storm first.
At first I thought it might be a mouse related issue. At one point before the error started scrolling, I saw this: “Mouse intialized.” Well, that might have been fine had there been a mouse attached. In fact, other than the DVD-ROM, I had no other additional devices connected - no mouse, no USB devices, no PCMCIA cards. So what gives?
Then came my next clue:
“acd0 FAILURE. READ_BIG MEDIUM ERROR.”
This leads me to consider the option that something is going on in DVD land.
Because I’m dealing with such dated hardware, here are my action items:
1) Replace the mouse. I was planning on doing it anyway, because I sure as hell don’t want to keyboard my way through the whole thing. Not that I can’t, but I don’t need that kind of hacker cred right now.
2) Make sure the BIOS is updated. It’s minor, but it might help, and frankly, I should have done that *first*.
3) RTFM to find out (a) what’s the deal with IRQ9, and (b) what is up with that “READ_BIG MEDIUM ERROR”. The BIOS doesn’t list a DVD-ROM as a boot option, even though that is the original disc drive. Could be a clue.
Long-term plan: upgrade the damned RAM to something a tad more modern.
More news as it happens. I’ll call this Phase One of the plan, because I haven’t even gotten to the software part of the Experiment yet!
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- Ubergeeke’s Repair Kit: Software
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- New Ham + VX-170 + Local Repeater = No Joy
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