Installer stuck in reboot loop - how can I enable a serial terminal to see why?

[dlavigne]

Does the latest 11 stable have the same issue? That has watchdog disabled in both the installer and the installed version.

 

[keylevel]

I've been using 11.0-U2 today, so it looks as if the watchdog is not being disabled?

I finally managed to get the first boot to complete by setting the BIOS to disable the watchdog and adding wbwd.0.disabled to the grub menu using 'e' as the system started. This is also the settings I need to get the live system to boot.

 

[dev_dull]

I encountered the same issue with both 11.0 and 11.1 on my Z10PE-D16-WS motherboard. As outlined by keylevel, editing the grub bootloader at install boot and after installation to include `set kFreeBSD.hint.wbwd.0.disabled=1` works around this issue.

On my mobo, WDT was disabled by default -- I tried once with it enabled, but got the same boot-loop result. Looks like this bug snuck back in from v9.

 

[dlavigne]

Watchdog is back on (for newer BMC firmware) for 11.1: http://doc.freenas.org/11/intro.html#new-features-in-release.