This section covers basic installation troubleshooting, such as common problems people have reported.

Check the Hardware Notes (https://www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html) document for the version of FreeBSD to make sure the hardware is supported. If the hardware is supported and lock-ups or other problems occur, build a custom kernel using the instructions in Chapter 8, Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel to add support for devices which are not present in the GENERIC kernel. The default kernel assumes that most hardware devices are in their factory default configuration in terms of IRQs, I/O addresses, and DMA channels. If the hardware has been reconfigured, a custom kernel configuration file can tell FreeBSD where to find things.

If the system hangs while probing hardware during boot, or it behaves strangely during install, ACPI may be the culprit. FreeBSD makes extensive use of the system ACPI service on the i386 and amd64 platforms to aid in system configuration if it is detected during boot. Unfortunately, some bugs still exist in both the ACPI driver and within system motherboards and BIOS firmware. ACPI can be disabled by setting the hint.acpi.0.disabled hint in the third stage boot loader:

set hint.acpi.0.disabled="1"

This is reset each time the system is booted, so it is necessary to add hint.acpi.0.disabled="1" to the file /boot/loader.conf. More information about the boot loader can be found in Section 13.1, “Synopsis”.