[wplug-bsd] Signal 11

[Brian Roberts]

Bill Moran wrote:

> Ghataora, Hardeep wrote:
>
>> Hey,
>>  
>> Anyone know why I'm getting a signal 11 when installing FreeBSD 4.9 
>> or 5.1, right after the hard disk formatting is complete I get a 'I 
>> caught a signal 11'. The only OS that does this is FreeBSD, other 
>> BSDs, and all LINUX work fine. The spec is as follows.
>>  
>> HP Brio BA410 (yeah, i know, well, it was free)
>> GeForce MX AGP
>> Intel Pro 10/100+ NIC
>> 512MB RAM (in 2x256MB matched memory modules, tried mismatching them 
>> too)
>> Creative/Ensoniq AudioPCI card
>> 40 GB Western Digital IDE hard disk (cable select, primary channel)
>> Floppy drive
>> 2 CD-ROMs (IDE) (both on cable select, secondary channel)
>>  
>> I've googled with little luck, any thoughts or pointers would be great.
>
>
> Have you tested the memory extensively?  sig 11s are frequently caused by
> flakey RAM.  I use memtest86 when in doubt:
> http://www.memtest86.com
>
> I'm trying to remember what happens immediately after the format, but I
> believe the next step is to transfer enough files to the HDD to create a
> bootable environment.  If you hit alt-F3 when the sig 11 occurs, is there
> anything more helpful on that screen?  Can you tell what the last thing
> it was trying to do was?
>
> It might just be incompatible hardware.  But I suspect (from your 
> description)
> that something in the install process of FreeBSD is tickling the problem.
>
Maybe totally unrelated,  but I once had a system that only would give 
sig 11's in FreeBSD on long compiles.   I rebuilt it as a linux box with 
no problems, but when I tried to reinstall FreeBSD i got continuous 
errors.   Turned out being a wrong CAS latency setting in bios.

just my .02

Brian