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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA7343 ; Mon, 18 Jan 93 10:52:21 EST Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!uunet!noc.near.net!news.Brown.EDU!not-for-mail From: tim@news.Brown.EDU (Timothy Miller) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: [386BSD] boot disk does absolutely nothing on gateway 4dx33v Date: 20 Jan 1993 15:47:42 -0500 Organization: Brown University -- Providence, Rhode Island USA Lines: 36 Distribution: world Message-ID: <1jkdpeINNkeg@cat.cis.Brown.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: cat.cis.brown.edu I have acquired the boot disk image for 386bsd, and no matter what I try, when my system starts up, it displays all the bios messages, and then hangs with the floppy drive light on. I have tried waiting for half an hour (just to be on the safe side), I've tried keeping the keyboard unplugged during reboot and also only unplugging it when it gets to the hang stage (because of reading about gateway keyboard problems), I've tried disabling in nvram/eeprom everything I can get my hands on, including setting IDE speed to slow, cpu speed to slow, internal & external caching off, bios shadowing disabled, ide block mode disabled, turning the ATI's memory aperture off, etc. I've tried booting off of fixit as well as dist, and as well as the debug versions of the bootables. I know I'm installing the disk image correctly because doing the same thing with the linux disk images works perfectly (in fact linux successfully installs and runs fine, without my even needing to turn anything off (except gcc dies unless I turn external caching off)). I've examined the source to the boot blocks for both linux and 386bsd (and confirmed that they matched the binaries), and as far as I can tell both are doing about the same things, with the exception that the 386bsd goes directly to the floppy ports where linux uses the bios interrupts, and linux loads itself into 0x90000 where 386bsd uses 0x98000. However, linux later writes directly to the floppy ports and that works fine, and linux uses the same port locations as 386bsd. Since I don't hear any disk access after the light turns on, I would guess that the hang is coming before the point where the boot block loads in anything else, but that's only a guess; I don't know if I'd necessarily hear it loading in the 15 sectors if that doesn't require moving the heads, for instance. My system is a Gateway 2000 4DX-33V with the ATI ultra pro VESA card, 8M of memory, the gateway 124 (?not sure of exact #) keyboard, and otherwise basically standard settings (one 340M IDE hard drive, no SCSI, no ethernet, no funny other cards). Does anyone have any idea what's wrong, how to fix it, or at least what I might do to try to find out where the hang is exactly and what the problem is (I don't have an in-circuit debugger, unfortunately, or I'd use it...)? Tim