Date: Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:04:53 PST From: Dieter <freebsd@sopwith.solgatos.com> To: Kevin Roettger <flymac@mac.com> Cc: freebsd-firewire@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Boot from Firewire (VIA Fire II) Message-ID: <201001200504.FAA18830@sopwith.solgatos.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:42:54 %2B0100." <122773021388063697565656768835963591048-Webmail@me.com>
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> 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.
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