Re: Trying to boot NetBSD on '97 Pentium I @ 200 MHz

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I've found a '97 Pentium I @ 200 MHz machine [...FreeDOS...NetBSD...]

> NetBSD/x86 cd9660 Primary Bootstrap

> ... and everything stops there.  Not a single character more.  The
> cursor is still blinking.

As I understand it, that may be meaningless, because the cursor can be
configured for hardware blinking.

If the machine has a serial port (which for a 1997 machine is
relatively likely), there *some* chance you may get something there;
I'm inclined to doubt it, but if it's easy for you to try it may be
worth doing just in case.

> NetBSD MBR boot
> 
> NetBSD/x86 ffsv1 Primary Bootstrap
> 
> ... and then everything stops, just like with the CD.

Have you gone through the BIOS settings, and/or reset them?

Another thing you might try is older NetBSD; NetBSD from around 1999 or
2000 stands a better chance of working on a 1997 machine.  My
experience has been that NetBSD is relatively good about running on
hardware older than contemporaneous with the software, but nothing is
perfect, and 10.* may not have been tested much on 29-year-old
hardware.

NetBSD makes it more difficult to get NetBSD older than 10.*.  It may
be that the difficulty I've had won't bother you, but, in case it does,
I have an archive of, I *think*, every version from 1.0 through 6.1.2,
which I can fix you up with if you'd like.

It's also possible that the reason the machine was where you found it
is that it's broken.  It's obviously not _too_ broken if FreeDOS runs
on it, but NetBSD is likely to exercise the hardware in at least a few
ways FreeDOS doesn't.

> Is there a way to make the boot procedure more verbose to see what
> happens when stage 1 tries to run stage 2, or if stage 2 gets stuck
> somewhere?

I don't know enough about 10.* to know whether there's anything better
than "add printfs and rebuild it".

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