> I was wondering if anybody can shed some light on this problem. We 
> currently have a pentium PCI/I-P54TP4 with the asus bios running Netbsd 1.0. 
> It appears that the system is unable to perform a soft reboot. We have
> upgraded our bios to release 111, but the problem is still there. 
> 
> Has anybody encountered/corrected the above reboot problem. Is this a 
> problem that perhaps is  fixed in Netbsd 1.1 ? 
> ==============================================================================
> George E. Navas   		navas@bayarea.net
> Voice: (408)447-8690  		Fax:(408)447-8691 	http://www.bayarea.net

I had similar trouble with NetBSD 1.0.  I thought, too, that it was my 
hardware/firmware.  I posted to the i386 list and a few responses came 
back where people had pointed out the different routines NetBSD uses to 
force a reboot.  After making a recommended mod and rebuilding the 
kernel, I still had no success.

What did work, though, was going to 1.0current and subsequently 1.1.  I 
had made no hardware upgrades or changes, and was using a fairly old 
486dx33 motherboard (Magitronic) and AMI BIOS.  After the upgrade to 
1.0current (this was late last summer), my soft reboots worked fine every 
time and I could rely on my machine to reboot from remote.

I know it may seem like a real pain to upgrade, but I wholeheartedly
recommend it.  MANY things are fixed in the new release, some of which 
are significant.  Be sure to grab the patch file that accompanies the 1.1 
release in case they haven't built it into the binary tar packages--if 
anything for your future kernel rebuilds.

People on the lists have mentioned trouble getting tape drives to work,
so I don't know what you can do for backup.  If you have an extra SCSI
disk, you could pop it into the chain and copy the files over or tar
it up with the new drive as the destination.

Good luck!

-- 
Matthew B. Wood                                               mbwood@netcom.com

  "Hello, Hello Kitty", said Tuxedo Sam. 
  A voice answered back, louder than a thousand rock concerts, with words
which seemed to stretch from pole to pole, from the lowest hell to the
highest heaven: "I AM HELLO KITTY, DESTROYER OF WORLDS!"