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Date: Sun, 13 Jul 1997 18:25:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: John M Vinopal <banshee@abattoir.com>
Message-Id: <199707140125.SAA08542@abattoir.com>
To: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Sullen ESDI drive
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Thanks to the few people who've mailed me with their suggestions on
getting my ESDI drive to boot under FreeBSD; unfortunately it has
come to naught, I believe because my (ancient) bios doesn't have a
user defined setting and the stage 2 freebsd boot really wants to
use those values.

The curious part of this is that NetBSD can boot just fine on this
machine.  I've been comparing the boot blocks which have diverged
somewhat but I'm not a good enough asm coder to discern what some
of the difference might imply.

Before I give up and install netbsd on this machine, is there any
way I can short circuit the boot block to do what I want (boot;)?
The ESDI disk uses 2 slices, one for the kernel and / such that the
bad144 cylinder is below 1023.  The disk is 1224/15/35, and its my
belief that the machine bios has no settings for anything but x/x/17.
This leads me to believe that I could hardcode the sector count and
install a custom bootblock.

Comments?  Should I boot from a floppy which chroots?  NFS boot
from another unix machine on the local net?

-j