Boot0 testing (WAS: Re: nanobsd image boot issues)

[Rick van der Zwet]

2009/5/5 Luigi Rizzo <rizzo at iet.unipi.it>:
> On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 11:58:35AM +0200, Rick van der Zwet wrote:
>> Down below a thread currently running at freebsd-embedded@ regarding
>> the boot0 loader and it's weirdness. I don't seems to find a proper
>> way of getting the boot0 loader to work on various (old) hardware,
>> like Pentium I PC's with awardBios, which I need to get nanobsd to
>> work properly on various types of hardware.

Turned out to be an issue with packet 'mode', as not all old PC's bios
did not have the support included, sigh :-(

> One problem I had with some old hardware was that the BIOS
> could not read more than one sector at a time, and eventually
> (but it was really long ago so i do not remember
> the details well) I had to patch some code so that
> reading would occur one sector at a time instead of
> using track-long blocks.

Déjà vu, that's fellow W(ireless)L(eiden) hacker Dw:
     http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2003-May/000636.html

>> Looking at the source code it seems to be 3 points of failure, ranging
>> from invalid input to unreadable sectors, but all ends with the same
>> generic warning (read: one 'beep'). I know space is limited, but how
>> about a different beep sequence for all warning, will that be
>> possible?

FYI: during debugging I wrote it to aid me. (thanks to the wonderful
SAVE_MEMORY and SAVE_MORE_MEMORY  flags for making coding easy).
     http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=134242

/Rick
-- 
http://rickvanderzwet.nl