Re: Trouble booting an IBM 7248 after installation

On 29 June 2014 06:45, William Orr <will%worrbase.com@localhost> wrote:
Hello all,

I’ve *almost* successfully installed NetBSD on my IBM 7248. My system is a little special though - the SCSI drive that it had was bad, so I instead installed on a CF Card that’s plugged into the IDE controller. The installation of NetBSD went beautifully, however I can’t boot my system.

The SMS sees the CF card as a bootable device, and when booting to it, the serial console hangs and the system never comes up. There’s no real activity happening on the CF card.

I then tried creating a netbootable image with the hope of netbooting into my installed system. I booted up the installer again, and dropped to a shell. I chrooted into my system and did /usr/mdec/mkbootimage -m prep -b /usr/mdec/boot_com0 -k /netbsd boot.fs and tried netbooting again. The system grabbed it via tftp, but it hung afterwards. Again, there were no reads on the CF card.

It’s worth noting that the CF card is 8GB, and SMS only sees it as roughly 3.7 GBs.

Here’s the partition table:

# fdisk /dev/wd0
Disk: /dev/wd0c
NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
cylinders: 15538, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 15662304

BIOS disk geometry:
cylinders: 975, heads: 255, sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)
total sectors: 15662304

Partitions aligned to 16065 sector boundaries, offset 63

Partition table:
0: Linux/MINIX (sharing disk with DRDOS) or Personal RISC boot (sysid 65)
   start 63, size 9800 (5 MB, Cyls 0-0/156/35), Active
       PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0x00)
1: NetBSD (sysid 169)
   start 9863, size 15652441 (7643 MB, Cyls 0/156/36-974/237/63)
       PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0x00)
2: <UNUSED>
3: <UNUSED>
First active partition: 0

And the disklabel:

# /dev/wd0c:
type: unknown
disk: TS8GCF133
label:
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 16
sectors/cylinder: 1008
cylinders: 15538
total sectors: 15662304
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # microseconds
track-to-track seek: 0 # microseconds
drivedata: 0

8 partitions:
#        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
a: 15127056      9863     4.2BSD   2048 16384     0 # (Cyl.      9*- 15016*)
b:    263088 15136919       swap                     # (Cyl. 15016*- 15277*)
c: 15662304         0     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0 - 15537)
e:      9800        63       boot                     # (Cyl.      0*-      9*)

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Its possible the 7248 is not happy with the CF to IDE adaptor, but
they are generally pretty compatible. Are you booting from SCSI CD and
running sysinst to install onto CF-on-IDE ?

I can't recall NetBSD's prep boot loader offhand - does it give a few
seconds countdown and an option to hit space to abort? If so could you
try interrupting the CD boot and then running 'boot netbsd -a'? If it
works it should prompt for a root device, which is probably going to
be wd0a to run from the installed system. If that works then it means
one workaround (for right now) would be to build a bootable CD with a
kernel set to use root on wd0a.