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cc: mike@smith.net.au, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: biosboot/start.S needs fix for Intel AL440LX motherboard 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 16 Oct 1997 22:12:16 MST."
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Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 15:02:47 +0930
From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
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> 
> yeah, it definitely looks like the bios is simply not setting %dl
> correctly.  i've moved the disk between machines and it works fine in
> every other config with 0x80 getting passed in.  it is clearly 0x00 on
> the al440lx board.

I guess we need to bring this to their attention; are there Intel 
insiders reading this?  Anyone with contacts at Intel or Phoenix?

> > Are you booting from a SCSI disk?  If so what controller?  Do you have 
> > an IDE disk you can try booting from?
> 
> tried several different 2940 cards.  i just tired an ide disk with the
> same results (%dl == 0x00).

OK, so it's nothing that they can blame on the disk controller BIOS.

> > 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.
> 
> yep, i think it's called "atlanta"

I won't have one, now.  Bummer.

> >   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.
> 
> actually you get a single "Read error" message.  and this is with the
> latest bios 4A4LL0X0.86A.0013.P03 dated 10/02/97.

OK.  Jordan; should I be munging RELNOTES, or is this one yours?

> btw, i ended up doing something similar to bteasy and made the
> following changes to start.S.

This breaks it for booting from a floppy, which isn't quite what we 
want.  It should work just fine for your application though.

mike