nanobsd image boot issues

[John Baldwin]

On Sunday 03 May 2009 10:29:17 pm John Hein wrote:
> Rick van der Zwet wrote at 14:20 +0200 on May  3, 2009:
>  > 2009/4/24 M. Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>:
>  > > In message: 
<5aaae08a0904231438v5b655056g8852dc11f1e83987 at mail.gmail.com>
>  > >            Rick van der Zwet <info at rickvanderzwet.nl> writes:
>  > > : Boot delay and fail issues on various hardware using nanobsd 
generated
>  > > : RELENG_7_1 images on a sandisk 2gb CF (SDCFH2-002G). For example 
while
>  > > : trying to run a image on a soekris net4521 (bios 1.33) it seems to
>  > > : take ages (up to a minute) to start booting. Same image supplied to a
>  > > : PC (intel Pentium 1 & award bios) using a CF->IDE converter does not
>  > > : seems to boot at all, neither does a net4801 (bios 1.33). Just seems
>  > > : trying to find a boot loader. The net4801 even bails out after a
>  > > : while. Output of fdisk of image list as follows:
>  > [snip: fdisk outputs]
>  > 
>  > > Have you enabled packet mode for boot in boot0 with boot0cfg?
>  > 
>  > I did. The problems turned out to be something completely different.
>  > Starting from soekris bios version 1.31 and upwards boot0sio does not
>  > work anymore, freezing forever while trying to boot initially e.g. not
>  > showing the following output:
>  >    F1   FreeBSD
>  >    F2   FreeBSD
>  > 
>  >    Default: F1
>  > 
>  > I generated my images like this:
>  >    $ fdisk -i -f _.fdisk da0
>  >    $ boot0cfg -B -b /boot/boot0sio -o packet -s 1 -m 3 da0
>  >    $ bsdlabel -w -B -b /boot/boot da0s1
>  >    $ bsdlabel -w -B -b /boot/boot da0s2
>  >    $ newfs /dev/da0s1a
>  >    $ newfs /dev/da0s2a
>  >    $ newfs /dev/da0s3
>  >    $ cat _.fdisk
>  >    # 1000944 2 63 16 0 8192 0
>  >    g c993 h16 s63
>  >    p 1 165 63 495873
>  >    p 2 165 495999 495873
>  >    p 3 165 991872 9072
>  > 
>  > When using /boot/boot0 instead of /boot/boot0sio all seems to work
>  > perfectly fine on all Soekris boards I could test it on (net4521,
>  > net4801, net5501).
>  > 
>  > Next comes the interesting question when I use the some CF card in PC
>  > is does _not_ work. I did get the output on the screen, but when
>  > trying to press F1 or F2 or CR. All I got was a beep and no progress
>  > forward, but just remain in the same section. Default behavior or
>  > something off?
> 
> Note that 7.1 (which is what I seem to recall you're using)
> changed the boot loader to use real mode (see sys/boot/i386/btx).
> 
> You could try using boot blocks from 7.0 (or 6.3) to see
> if it makes a difference..

boot0 doesn't use BTX so those changes should not affect that.  Luigi (luigi@) 
did make some changes to boot0, however, and you may want to ask him about 
this.

-- 
John Baldwin