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To: filo@yahoo.com
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Subject: Re: biosboot/start.S needs fix for Intel AL440LX motherboard 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 16 Oct 1997 20:18:18 MST."
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Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 13:09:20 +0930
From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
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> > I should point out that, having just checked, their practice of passing 
> > 0 in %dl to the bootstrap is in direct violation of the BIOS Boot 
> > Specification version 1.01, 11 Jan 1997.  Quoting:
...
> > Do you have any idea who is responsible for this BIOS? (ie. is it an 
> > Intel in-house job, or a third party like Phoenix or Award?)
> 
> it's a phoenix bios.  of course it's possible that i'm just being
> stupid and there's an option somewhere that needs to be changed.
> still looking..

I don't think so; I *honestly* can't think of any reason they would 
deliberately blow off a standard they co-authored.

Are you booting from a SCSI disk?  If so what controller?  Do you have 
an IDE disk you can try booting from?

I won't have my hands on one of those boards until mid-next week (this 
is an "Atlantic", correct?), and probably not for very long then.

Jordan, can you perhaps work something like this into the RELNOTES for 
2.2.5, in case we don't manage to track this one down:

(Known bugs section maybe?)

  The Intel AL440LX "Atlantic" motherboard BIOS is incompatible with the
  FreeBSD bootstrap.  To work around this, the boot disk MUST NOT be
  sliced using the "dedicated" mode, and the BootEasy boot manager MUST
  be installed.

  Symptoms of this problem are a system which attempts to access the 
  floppy disk when booting from the hard disk, displaying an endless
  succession of 

C:0 H:0 S:0 

  error messages.

David; can you confirm that last paragraph?  I'm just guessing there.

mike