On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 06:12:45PM +0100, David Laight wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 29, 2005 at 03:58:36PM +0200, Alexander Rigbo wrote:
> > Hi list,
> > 
> > I have an compaq proliant 800 which can't boot from IDE.
> 
> Any idea why?
> I'm surprised that the system can't boot from disks the bios knows of.
> And if the bios doesn't know about them, then they can't be booted at all.
> (all the boot programs use bios calls to read the disk)
Compaq thinks they're cool and uses a bios configuration program on a hidden partition on the harddrive, and i don't own the original harddrive from this computer and a new bios is nowhere to be found.

> 
> > Can i create a floppy containing a bootloader that gets the kernel from
> > the FS? If so, can anyone tell me where to look for instructions on doing so?
> 
> There are many ways of doing this!
Oh, goodie.

> 
> One possiblity is just use the mbr_bootsel code to load the bootstrap
> of the hard disk.  You could make that the default with not timeout!
I'll look into mbr_bootsel.

> 
> Anything else probably requires intervention during the boot process,
> or some bit of code modified to change the default.
> It is possibly to put an FFS (or even FAT) filesytem onto a floppy and
> load /boot from there.
> Or just use the boot/install floppy.
I wasn't able to boot my installed netbsd from the install floppy. Can you tell me exactly (well, almost) how to do that?

> 
> 	David
> 
> -- 
> David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk
>