Re: Looking for suggestions for small, low power machine

[Jukka Marin <jmarin%embedtronics.fi@localhost>]

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 05:43:15PM +0100, David Laight wrote:
> On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 12:35:08PM +0300, Jukka Marin wrote:
> > 
> > I got a 5501 box now - with zero documentation.  How do I make it boot from
> > a CF card?  I installed NetBSD 5.1 on a CF, and did installboot but 5501 
> > does
> > not boot from the card ("No Boot device available, enter monitor.").
> 
> How far does the boot get ?

Not very far, I'm now getting "Error Disk read" which comes from bootxx.
I do have /boot on the CF.

> If it doesn't find the bootxx code, then maybe you have a disk geometry issue.
> Although the mbr/pbr code should only be trying to read sector 0 and
> sector 63 - both of which probably don't depend on the reported geometry.
> Using 'mbr_lba' might help.

I think it finds bootxx (because bootxx seems to be the one that prints the
error message I'm getting).  But why doesn't it load the second stage loader..

Some more info.. Soekris:

Pri Mas  CF Card                         LBA Xlt 977-64-63  1970 Mbyte

fdisk:

Disk: /dev/rsd0d
NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 3909, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 3940272

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 246, heads: 255, sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 3940272

Partition table:
0: NetBSD (sysid 169)
    start 63, size 3940209 (1924 MB, Cyls 0-245/68/63), Active
1: <UNUSED>
2: <UNUSED>
3: <UNUSED>
Bootselector disabled.
First active partition: 0

disklabel:

# /dev/rsd0d:
type: SCSI
disk: Card Reader   CF
label: fictitious
flags: removable
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 16
sectors/cylinder: 1008
cylinders: 3909
total sectors: 3940272
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # microseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # microseconds
drivedata: 0 

6 partitions:
#        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
 a:    262144        63     4.2BSD   1024  8192     0  # (Cyl.      0*- 260*)
 d:   3940272         0     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0 - 3908)
 e:   2097152    262207     4.2BSD   1024  8192     0  # (Cyl.    260*- 2340*)
 f:   1580000   2359359     4.2BSD   1024  8192     0  # (Cyl.   2340*- 3908*)

It's probably something simple, just can't see it now.. even tried netboot,
but my bootparamd didn't seem to answer the requests.  (I'm getting dumber,
I did get diskless boot working some 15 years ago ;)

  -jm