Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 11:34:48 -0700 (PDT) From: David Wolfskill <david@catwhisker.org> To: imp@harmony.village.org, raj@cisco.com Cc: freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, jandrese@mitre.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD/X11 on NEC Daylite? Message-ID: <200109251834.f8PIYmt84671@bunrab.catwhisker.org> In-Reply-To: <15280.49259.374816.666581@rast.cisco.com>
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>From: Richard Johnson <raj@cisco.com> >Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 10:40:41 -0700 (PDT) >In this case, the system recognizes the drive and I can even install >FreeBSD on it with no problems, however when I try to boot from it I >see: > F1 DOS > F2 FreeBSD >and whichever one you select it simply beeps and does nothing. It turns out that my firewall system at home had a remarkably similar set of symptoms. (No, I wasn't setting it up to boot a M$ OS; I was setting it up to have a pair of bootable FreeBSD slices, to facilitate recovery if an upgrade got botched.) (I posted a note about it to -hardware; see http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=10646+0+archive/2001/freebsd-hardware/20010923.freebsd-hardware for that bit of deathless prose.) In frustration, I boought another used PC, intending to set *it* up as the new firewall system... only to find that it exhibited the same behavior. But if I did an install, and told sysinstall to "use the whole disk" (still with an MBR; we're not talking Dangerously Dedicated, here), it was fine. So I prowled around; the BIOS claimed to be from 1992, and after some rather lucky guesses, I found that the motherboard was (probably?) made by Intel, and that there was a more recent BIOS available (1997 vintage). After weirder stuff than I really want to think about, I managed to flash the BIOS to the new version... and the machine now copes with multiple bootable slices Just Fine, thank you very much. I don't have proof (yet) that this is what affects my current firewall machine, but once the new one is deployed, I intend to experiment some.... I sure hope someone else can learn from all this. :-} Cheers, david -- David H. Wolfskill david@catwhisker.org As a computing professional, I believe it would be unethical for me to advise, recommend, or support the use (save possibly for personal amusement) of any product that is or depends on any Microsoft product. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message
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