Boot from Firewire (VIA Fire II)

[Dieter]

> I am trying to boot from a Firewire drive using FreeBSD 8.0 on a i386
> system. My motherboard is an Asus A7V8X-X and Firewire ports are
> provided using a VIA Fire II (VT6306) PCI card.
> 
> The card works once FreeBSD is booted from internal IDE drive for example
> (seen as fwohci0) but I cannot boot from it. I've tried pretty much all boot
> possibilities in the BIOS and no luck (it doesn't even find the drive).

I think your VIA card needs to have a "BIOS boot ROM" in order to boot from it.

Alternately, if one of the FLOSS BIOSs supports your mainboard, it might
be possible to add support there.

I have a mainboard with the VT6307 onboard, but I don't recall seeing any mention
of it (or Firewire) in the BIOS.  On an unrelated note, are you able to get your
VT6306 into "non-CYCLEMASTER mode"?

> My question is: is it possible to "bootstrap" from another source (USB stick,
> floppy...), load a small kernel with Firewire support to see the drive and then
> switch kernels to "boot again" from that FW drive? Of course It would be nice
> to not need the USB stick for anything once switched to the FW drive (but not
> mandatory).

You might be able to boot the FreeBSD boot loader from some bootable device,
and have the boot loader load the kernel from a Firewire drive.  See loader(8).
Environment variables that look potentially useful: rootdev, bootfile, currdev.
I don't know if the boot loader knows how to talk to the VIA card and load from
a Firewire drive.

If this doesn't work, I think you'd need most or all of /boot on the
bootable device.

> Actually, FreeBSD is already installed on this machine but using internal IDE,
> I'd like to remove all drives from inside the computer case and use only an
> external drive enclosure. Ideally I would like to keep the same drive and not
> reinstall (of course I assume fstab changes are needed).

If your main goal is to get the disks outside the case, you might consider eSATA.
If your mainboard doesn't have SATA, you can add a SATA controller card, or
use a PATA-to-SATA bridge.  eSATA is a lot faster then Firewire or USB.  Downside
is that the cables can't be as long.