On Feb 5, Charlie Amos <amos@umiacs.umd.edu> wrote:

> I'm trying to install netBSD 1.1 on a 1.2 GB IDE drive (all by itself; no
> DOS) and am having trouble getting the bootstrap code going. It gives a
> "Read Error" upon boot. I can do the bootstrapping from a floppy then boot
> from wd(0,a) but I'd much prefer to boot totally from the IDE drive.  This
> smells of a disk geometry problem but I (and others) have beat on it
> profusely and we are at a loss as to what to try next. 

Just so no one wastes time staring at the boot block code wondering what
might cause this, it turns out it's not NetBSD's fault. We poked around
with this on his new machine and mine (both Micron - P166 Millenia w/ on
board IDE and P133 Millenia Plus with NCR 825 SCSI controller, respectively)
and I found out, by fiddling with the boot blocks, that DL is not getting
set with the drive number during bootup (i.e. I had it print out the contents
of DL in binary on bootup, and even with a hard drive boot it was still showing
00000000). I'm rather baffled by this glaring error in our BIOS's.

At least, though, it's not NetBSD's problem. :) (we're able to boot for now
with an icky patch to the boot code)

matt