Re: old machine--booting problem

[Nick Holland <nick@holland-consulting.net>]

Well, I have run OpenBSD on a number of "older Compaqs" (right off the
bat, we got a problem.  I consider "older" P75 and before.  I've seen
some people call PII-266s "older", and just had someone "throw out" a
pair of PII-333s in my direction, and if judged from a utility
standpoint, "older" could mean pre-486), and found normally the
hardware either is recognized or isn't.  Some of them have SCSI chips
(old NCR, AMD) that are just not supported by OpenBSD at this time
(and given the forward direction of the project, will probably not be
supported), others work fine.  

>From your description, I would hazzard a guess that you have a
configuration problem with the system.  Blow the drive clean, and
install the Compaq Maintenance partition stuff on it (it always seems
to get nuked by someone wondering "what's this 'NON DOS PARTITION'
here?").  If the machine has a jumper to clear the NVRAM, do it.  My
guess is you have the SCSI BIOS disabled on the machine, which would
match what you are seeing (not bootable, but you probably could
install to a HD).    

Some concrete details would be nice.  Someone could say "Yeah, tried
it, didn't work" or "works great for me"

George Lewis wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I have an older Compaq machine that has bizarre BIOS issues. I can
> install OpenBSD fine, but it doesn't setup the boot correctly on
> the hard disk. This in itself is not a big deal, I've read the man
> pages and done the installboot and all of that stuff, but not much
> luck.
> 
> I used to have slackware loaded on this box, and to get around this
> same problem I just put in the slackware boot disk that doubled as
> a rescue disk, loading the kernel off of the floppy but loading the
> system off of the root partition on the hard disk.
> 
> The box is SCSI based, and I assume that since the OpenBSD boot
> doesn't list sd0 as a boot device (thus thwarting boot sd0a:/bsd...only
> listing fd0)
> 
> I can't boot at all. OpenBSD (and all other OS's I've had on this
> box have this problem, so it's got some weird issues) doesn't know
> about the SCSI devices until it loads the controller driver and
> then it finds the disk. The SCSI controller (NCR chipset IIRC) is
> onboard. I've tried setting image and device variables at the boot
> prompt, but no luck. Perhaps I'm missing something there.
> 
> Any clues or things I can do to work around this? I may end up doing
> a network boot or something, but would rather use the internal disk
> to load the OS if possible.
> 
> If more details about the disk/controller/bios/etc would be helpful,
> please let me know, but I assume this is a more generic question
> of is it possible to boot a hard disk while loading the boot/kernel
> from a floppy, if the boot loader doesn't know about the upcoming
> hard disk already?
> 
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> George
> 
> --
> George Lewis
> http://schvin.net/

-- 
http://www.holland-consulting.net/