On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 04:46:40AM -0500, Peter Eisch wrote:
> On 7/18/05 1:43 AM, "Bernd Ernesti" <netbsd@lists.veego.de> wrote:
> 
> >> I think its usual to boot to harddisk, if no keys are pressed.
> > 
> > You insert such a CD to install from it, nothing more.
> > 
> 
> I'd prefer to keep the OS Install cdrom actually in the cdrom tray.  I have
> several systems that do firewall or spam filtering applications where the
> disaster recovery process is to reinstall the OS after attending to the the
> harddrive failure.  The last thing I want to worry about through the
> recovery process is finding a copy of the media at the site.

IMHO this is not the normal use for cdboot, at least not the intended.

[..]
> <bikeshedding>
> 
> Sparc{,64}, macppc, alpha (and others?) behave perfectly.  They'll only boot
> from cdrom if there's an external force or the harddrive is bootable (e.g.
> boot-disk disk,cdrom).

Can't you do the same with the BIOS on i386?
My BIOS has an option to select the boot order where it boots from.

Now, there is a DISABLE_KEYPRESS compile time option, which is a start,
but I think thats not what was really wanted.
The default should be to boot from the CD, but have the possibility to stop that
with an keypress.

At least it should automatically boot from the CD if there was no NetBSD
partition found.

Bernd