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Date:      Sat, 13 Apr 2002 17:26:16 -0400
From:      "Matthew Emmerton" <matt@gsicomp.on.ca>
To:        "Drew Tomlinson" <drew@mykitchentable.net>, <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Boot Help - I've Gotten Myself Into Quite A Mess!
Message-ID:  <001e01c1e331$d90d1360$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca>
References:  <00ca01c1e32f$213034e0$0301a8c0@bigdaddy>

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> I was recently given an old Pentium 133 and motherboard so I decided
> to replace my 486.  I shutdown, opened the case, replaced the
> motherboard, and tried to reboot.  Well, DUH!  My kernel is compiled
> for a 486 and thus it panics because it finds the Pentium.  See below:

Heh.  I won't say how many times that's happened to me.

> ok LOAD KERNEL.GENERIC
> can't find 'KERNEL.GENERIC'
>
> Is the problem because everything is in all caps?  I have pressed the
> caps lock key but it makes no difference.  It's in all caps all the
> time.

I think the boot loader will accept commands in both upper and lower case,
but filenames are case sensitive.

Before giving you a workaround, have you tried using a different keyboard?
The only time I've seen a keyboard get stuck in all-caps is when it's on its
last legs.

In the meantime, what you can do to get this thing to boot is use the
backdoor method of generating ASCII characters from your keyboard.  What you
do is hold down ALT, and then punch in 0 and then the 3-digit (decimal)
ASCII code of your lowercase letters -- using the numeric keypad.  (It won't
work with numbers along the top of the keyboard.)

So in your case, type LOAD <space> ALT-0107 ALT-0101 ALT-0114 ALT-0110
ALT-0101 ALT-0108 <dot> GENERIC <enter>  You should see "LOAD
kernel.GENERIC" on your screen, and the loader should be able to find it and
boot from it.

Now, the bigger problem is that your keyboard is borked.  Once you get to a
login prompt, you won't be able to login (unless you've got a 100%
uppercase/numeric usercode and password), so you'll have to use the ALT-0xxx
trick, which will make things really painful.

--
Matt


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