Re: bootable disk: how?

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA@localhost>]

>> Okay, I give up.  What does it take to make a disk bootable?
>> [...]
> Hello.  Having recently felt your pain, I can offer a couple of
> suggestions.

:-/

> Normally, I use the routine
> fdisk -c /usr/mdec/mbr /dev/rwd0d
> or the d partition of which ever disk I'm working on.

Hm, is that equivalent to answering y to the "update bootcode?"
question?  I never used fdisk -c.  I'll have to try it.

> Then,
> fdisk -a /dev/rwd0d
> to insure the active partition is the correct one.

Well, according to "fdisk wd0", there's only one non-null partition,
and it's marked "Active".

> Be sure to check and make sure the disklabel and partition tables
> agree on which sector the 'a' partition begins.

fdisk says "start 63"; disklabel has 63 in the "offset" column.  Is
that good enough?

> Next, I do:
> cd /usr/mdec
> installboot -v -o <options, usually console> /dev/rwd0a bootxx_ffsv1
> , since I usually boot from ffsv1 filesystems.

(And indeed ffsv1 is what's on this disk.)  I did that, except I ran
installboot from elsewhere and specified a path to bootxx_ffsv1, and
didn't specify any options (and hence no -o).

> Finally, the one which has tripped me up most recently, is to check
> and make sure you have a modern copy of /usr/mdec/boot in the /boot
> file of the filesystem you're booting from.

It's identical to the (working) /boot on the 3.0 machine.  It might,
however, have holes, which may matter.  I'll try copying /boot from the
4.0 machine into place.

> Without this, even with all of those steps above, you'll get the
> kinds of error messages you're seeing.

Really?  I'd expect it to produce a different message if the bootblocks
start but get something nonworking when they try to load /boot.
Apparently I don't know as much as I thought I did about i386 boot
seequences. :)

> If that doesn't fix it, insure that you and BIOS agree on which disk
> is disk 0.  I've found on some machines, NetBSD and the bios differ
> wildly on which disk is wd0, and, consequently, I've been
> administering to a disk that the bios doesn't give a wit about.

Well, on the 4.0 machine, there's wd0 and sd0, and that's it for disks.
The BIOS boot sequence is set to something like "CDROM,C,A"; normally
it boots from sd0, and to try wd0 I use the SCSI card's setup BIOS code
to disable it, so C: is wd0 instead of sd0.

I'll try your instructions and report my results. :)

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