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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
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From: cq@staff.cc.purdue.edu (Rob Tillotson)
Subject: Re: Floppy problems at boot.
In-Reply-To: julian@TFS.COM's message of Tue, 16 Nov 1993 01:25:16 GMT
Message-ID: <CQ.93Nov17101624@staff.cc.purdue.edu>
Summary: now the floppy works, but it won't boot from HD... sigh
Sender: news@mentor.cc.purdue.edu (USENET News)
Organization: Who ya gonna call? CloneBusters!
References: <CQ.93Nov15185922@staff.cc.purdue.edu> <CGK9A4.M82@tfs.com>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1993 15:16:24 GMT
Lines: 59
In article <CGK9A4.M82@tfs.com>, julian@TFS.COM (Julian Elischer) writes:
>In article <CQ.93Nov15185922@staff.cc.purdue.edu>,
>Rob Tillotson <cq@staff.cc.purdue.edu> wrote:
>Hey I wish I'd heard about this earlier.. Both I and Bill
>Jolitz run TI 4000 laptops.
Cool, I'm in good company :-) Just wondering, do you happen to have a
mouse driver for the TI's PS/2 port? If not, I will probably just go
ahead and port the one from Linux...
>go into the setup screens find the power saving screen
>and turn OFF the entry "advanced os power savings" (or
>something similar)
>the floppy will magically start to work.
Thanks! I am now (almost) happily running NetBSD-current on my
portable. All this time I thought that the "advanced os power"
function was turned off along with the rest of them, since it is
indented under the same group as the rest... silly me, expecting the
user interface to match reality :-) :-)
Anyway, I have another question which you may be able to answer - I am
posting this to news because someone else may be able to help as well.
I have successfully installed NetBSD but it will not boot from the
hard drive. Here is the situation:
I am attempting to share the drive approximately 50/50 between an
existing DOS partition and a NetBSD partition. The NetBSD partition
is replacing a previous Linux partition, so the DOS partition is
neither newly created nor recently modified. (However, when
originally installing Linux I used FIPS, if that makes a difference.)
Apparently, the BIOS is using geometry translation, since the drive
has more than 1024 cylinders. I was able to get NetBSD to work by
using the translated values in the disklabel. NetBSD correctly finds
and uses wd0a and wd0b when I boot from floppy, loading the kernel
from wd0a. However, attempting to boot directly from the disk
partition fails with the error "Missing operating system". I
installed OS-BS 1.35. Using it, MS-DOS boots fine, but selecting the
BSD menu item reports "no operating system" and hangs.
In desperation, I attempted a variation of the hack that appears in
the 386BSD FAQ, part 2. That is, I made a tiny partition in the
unused area of the first physical track of the disk, made it bootable,
and put the NetBSD first-stage loader there, leaving the original
NetBSD partition as type A5 so that the disklabel could be found.
Using that setup, it at least doesn't think there is no bootblock, but
instead it just hangs when that partition is booted.
Aaargh,
--Rob
--
Rob Tillotson N9MTB Internet: cq@staff.cc.purdue.edu
BITNET: CQ@PURCCVM