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From: William Wong <wwong@wiley.csusb.edu>
Message-Id: <199707141000.DAA05476@wiley.csusb.edu>
Subject: Re: Sullen ESDI drive
To: banshee@abattoir.com (John M Vinopal)
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 1997 03:00:46 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <199707140125.SAA08542@abattoir.com> from "John M Vinopal" at Jul 13, 97 06:25:18 pm
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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
> 
> 

I had the same problem trying to install FreeBSD 2.x on old AT&T 386 machines
using 200 Meg. ESDI drives.  I was only sucessful when installing FreeBSD
1.1.5.1.  Your similar problem has just renewed my interest in trying to
resurrect these old machines. :)  Maybe we could start with 1.1.5.1 and find
out why it is successful.

-- 
William T. Wong
Cal State University, San Bernardino
  Phone:   (909) 880-7281
  email:   wwong@wiley.csusb.edu