On Sun, Jan 02, 2005 at 10:08:14PM +0100, Timo Sch?ler wrote:
> 
> i'm trying to set up a soekris-like [1] board -- a PC Engines WRAP .1D 

> AFAIK, this *should* boot: installboot and the second stage bootloader 
> are in place as well as the kernel; the geometry is that of the card as 
> the board it's desired to run on sees it (i tried both geometries, the 
> 'Phys' and 'Log'):

The geometry isn't relevant to your problem, it is only used to set the
CHS values in the MBR.  The boot code will ask the bios for the current
geometry, validate that the CHS value matches the LBA one, and do an LBA
read if it doesn't.

> powering up the board having a serial connection (this is the reason 
> for the extra installboot options which can be seen above) i always end 
> up here:
> 
> NetBSD/i386 ffsv1 Primary Bootstrap
> Boot failed (errno  0): Invalid /boot file format.

Ok, the bootxx_ffsv1 code has been read.
It has even found a file called /boot and read (at least some of) it.
It expects the file to start with a 'magic' number, whatever file it is
reading doesn't seem to have the correct header.

'hexdump -C -n 16 boot' should give:
00000000  eb 7e 89 f6 d2 b6 86 78  78 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
                      ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^
The last 4 bytes, and the bytes following are where the boot parameters
are copied to, but the primary bootstrap code is only looking at 4 bytes.

> No boot device available, press Enter to continue.
That message is from your BIOS...

	David

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