DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 installation failures

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Thu Feb 6 18:26:32 PST 2020


This is a final status report on the failure of DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 to
install on my new Dell Precision 7920 workstation.

There appear to be two problems with my environment: the DragonFlyBSD
installer does not recognize the Realtek USB controller on the Dell,
nor does it recognize the SATA controller.

By numerous experiments, we found that switching the keyboard from a
USB one to a PS/2 one solved the no-keyboard-input problem.

We successfully installed DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 on Crucial MX500 1TB SSD
on a Lenovo ThinkCenter all-in-one workstation, and were able to boot
that installation to a login prompt on both that system, and on a Mac
Pro tower, confirming that both the USB stick with the installer and
the Crucial SSD are OK.

On the Dell, today we installed a new 2-port Inateck USB-3.0 PCI-E
card, and plugged the keyboard and a Sabrent SATA-to-USB-3 box into
that card.  The system now boots to a login prompt on the Dell, and
I've done extensive binary package installations, and a fresh build of
the latest TeX Live 2020 source tree.

The only drawback of this workaround is that the Crucial disk is
accessed over a USB-3 connection, rather than a direct SATA
connection.

My thanks go to several list members for helpful offline
correspondence that led to a solution!


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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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