[PC-BSD Testing] PCBSD 8.1-RC1 spontaneous reboot during upgrade

[Kris Moore]

On 06/21/2010 14:10, Ian Robinson wrote:
> This report is unrelated to any of my prior posts because this is on a 
> different computer.
>
> Testing PCBSD 8.1-RC1 on an HP Vectra VL420, P4 @ 1.6 GHz, 1.5 GHz 
> RAM, nVidia GeForce 5 Series w/ 256 Mb RAM.
>
> I was doing an upgrade over top of PCBSD 8.0.  I was also running top 
> in an x-term terminal.  The installer was going through the process of 
> removing the 8.0 packages and had not reached the point where the 
> installation progress bar begins to display.  About ten minutes of 
> operation into the upgrade as measured by the clock counter in top  
> (i.e., measuring from boot-up), the system locked as shown by no 
> activity in the installer, or in top, and mouse cursor would not 
> move.  Then the computer spontaneously rebooted.
>
> Subsequent retries to "upgrade" all resulted in spontaneous reboots.  
> Attempts to start the system failed because key packages had been 
> removed by this point.  I had to start a fresh install.  No harm done 
> as all important data was backed up before beginning the upgrade.
>
> There is great merit to having the installer report its activities to 
> the user, and even when they fly by so fast you cannot always read 
> them, you do get a sense to what is going on.
>
> Ian Robinson
> Salem, Ohio

Doh! Please don't re-install from scratch until you report something in :)

This sounds like a kernel panic, and we'll need to see if we can find 
what the error is exactly. For future reference, the way to do this is such:

* Start install
* Switch to "console" with Ctrl-Alt-F1

Monitor the console for any kernel messages. When the kernel panics, it 
should give you 15 seconds to press a key to pause the auto-reboot. If 
you can, take a pic of the panic message, or send the details over by 
transcribing them. That'll let us figure out if its a driver bug, kernel 
bug, etc.

-- 
Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software
iXsystems