Help needed with a stubborn Gateway box!

[Paul Goyette <paul%vps1.whooppee.com@localhost>]

After a long break from NetBSD (associated with my retirement and 
subsequent relocation to the Philippines), I'm trying to get back into 
the NetBSD world.  The first thing I need to do is get a local machine 
installed.

The only machine I have available is a Gateway SX2185.  It has an AMD 
E1-2500 APU (dual core at 1.4GHz), and Radeon HD8240.  It came with 
Windows 8.1 pre-installed, but that's now no longer available.  :)

The BIOS announces itself as "for Gateway only" so presumably they've 
done something special to prevent folks like me from loading some 
non-standard OS.  I downloaded the boot.iso file from a recent HEAD 
build on nbftp and burned it to a DVD, but the BIOS doesn't recognize 
it.

Surprisingly, I just happen to have a Ubuntu 14.04.1 DVD from late July 
of last year, and this DVD boots just fine.

So, I figured I would just go ahead and install Ubuntu, and let it take 
care of setting up boot blocks etc on the hard drive.  I planned to boot 
the resulting image, interrupt the boot, and ask it to load sysinst from 
by NetBSD media.  (I planned to _not_ replace boot blocks during the 
install, so it would leave grub on the hard drive...)

Unfortunately, I know next-to-zero about grub, so I have no clue on how 
to ask it to load the CD.  On-line grub docs are not much help, and the 
'help' command within grub is pretty useless since it does not seem to 
have any ability to "more" or "less" or "page" its output (and so I only 
get a list of commands, starting with the letter 's' thru 'z').

So, any suggestions on how to proceed?

1) Is my plan to use the ubuntu-installed copy of grub to boot the 
NetBSD boot.iso media successful?

2) Is my plan to leave the ubuntu-installed copy of grub on the disk 
(rather than writing new boot blocks) going to work?

3) Is there some other way of getting this beast booted into NetBSD?

Thanks in advance for any clues you may have to offer.




-------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Paul Goyette     | PGP Key fingerprint:     | E-mail addresses:       |
| (Retired)        | FA29 0E3B 35AF E8AE 6651 | paul at whooppee.com    |
| Network Engineer | 0786 F758 55DE 53BA 7731 | pgoyette at juniper.net |
| Kernel Developer |                          | pgoyette at netbsd.org  |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------