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Date:      Tue, 24 Feb 1998 15:22:42 -0800 (PST)
From:      Simon Shapiro <shimon@simon-shapiro.org>
To:        Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
Cc:        Mark Blackman <tmb@rcru.rl.ac.uk>, freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: SMP success on W6-LI
Message-ID:  <XFMail.980224152242.shimon@simon-shapiro.org>
In-Reply-To: <199802242305.PAA16863@dingo.cdrom.com>

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On 24-Feb-98 Mike Smith wrote:
>> 
>> On 24-Feb-98 Mark Blackman wrote:
>> 
>>  ...
>> 
>> > Forgot to mention that that the 4.06 Phoenix BIOS won't let me boot
>> > FreeBSD from either the IDE or SCSI hard drive, so I'm compelled
>> > to use the floppy just to get things kicked off.  This Phoenix
>> > BIOS boot problem has been alluded to in a couple of the
>> > other mail messages on some of the other lists.  It's an 
>> > annoyance but a tolerable one.
>> 
>> Did you try to low-level format the drives?
>> 
>> The cause is too sinister to verbalize.  Try to swap drives beween
>> machines
>> too.  Hint:  BIOS-MBR-M$
> 
> The problem here is most likely actually a known bug in the Phoenix 
> BIOS core where they fail to correctly initialise the register which 
> holds the BIOS drive ID of the boot device.  
> 
> Because FreeBSD is one of the few operating systems that actually 
> supports booting any disk using the same bootblock, this causes some 
> problems.
> 
> Especially when the value that is erroneously inserted is 0 (BIOS drive 
> ID for the floppy).

This is another problem than what I was thinking about.  I was thinking
about where the BIOS declares (silently) the MBR to be R/O, and only boots
Win95, unless you zap the MBR.

----------


Sincerely Yours, 

Simon Shapiro
Shimon@Simon-Shapiro.ORG                      Voice:   503.799.2313

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