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Date:      Wed, 1 Jul 1998 11:03:14 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Bill Paul <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>
To:        lcremean@tidalwave.net
Cc:        mike@smith.net.au, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 'fatal trap 12' on boot (smp and up)
Message-ID:  <199807011503.LAA06760@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu>
In-Reply-To: <19980630201717.09849@st-lcremean.tidalwave.net> from "Lee Cremeans" at Jun 30, 98 08:17:17 pm

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Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Lee Cremeans 
had to walk into mine and say:

> On Tue, Jun 30, 1998 at 05:38:04PM -0400, Bill Paul wrote:
> > I don't know if this is something to do with the BIOS or something
> > peculiar about how the x86 CPUs work, but with these three bytes,
> > it loads the FreeBSD boot floppy fine. I'm sure Bruce Evans will
> > jump in eventually to explain everything, except why nobody thought
> > to do this in the first place.
> 
> It sounds like the BIOS to me; this is the first time I've ever seen a PC
> that checks for a short jump and a NOP at the beginning of sector 0. What
> kind of BIOS is this?

It's an AMI BIOS. It says:

AMIBIOS MOBILE '96 256KB  BIOS OPTI FIRESTAR, 82c814 DOCKING
C8T 65554 VGA, TI 1151 CARDBUS, ESS 1878/690/938  07/03/97 R1.06

If you press DEL for setup, you get this mouse-driven setup screen.

After it passes the POST, it displays an 'Amarican Megatrends Power
Management BIOS version 0.0' graphic logo for a few seconds before reading 
the boot blocks.

> (and does that FCC certification sticker have an ID on
> it? YOu can find the manufacturer using that, get the first 3 chars and go
> to http://www.fcc.gov/oet/fccid.

Ooo... good idea. The FCC ID is: L4PK7000S13. According to this page
(which insists on using secure communications that don't work with
Mozilla, I'll have you know), it's made by a company called Kapok
Computer Co. in Taiwan. The form indicates that the original grant
was mailed to a 'Sporton International Inc.'

On the whole, it doesn't seem like a bad machine, except for this 
nonsense with the boot blocks.

-Bill

-- 
=============================================================================
-Bill Paul            (212) 854-6020 | System Manager, Master of Unix-Fu
Work:         wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu | Center for Telecommunications Research
Home:  wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu | Columbia University, New York City
=============================================================================
 "It is not I who am crazy; it is I who am mad!" - Ren Hoek, "Space Madness"
=============================================================================

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