nanobsd image boot issues

[Rick van der Zwet]

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?

/Rick (reply-to-all button is sometimes hard to find)
--
http://rickvanderzwet.nl