On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 02:12:00PM +0200, Frank van der Linden wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 18, 2003 at 07:13:28AM -0500, Richard Rauch wrote:
> > I'd rather try a serial console before another card, first.  If I uncomrent the
> > line in INSTALL about forcing a serial console, build a release, and make a
> > bootable CD as for i386 (but specifying the amd64 dir, instead), will that make a
> > bootable CD with a serial console?
> 
> You can specify the output device from the bootblock prompt. I forgot how..
> breaking in to it and typing 'help' or '?' should show you.

Hm.  If I recall, I was not offered a prompt, come to think of it.  Not, at least,
with the CD image.

The motherboard tosses up a couple of other prompts for features and the one time that
I booted from the i386 hard disk was an accident, as I got distracted and suddenly
found it booting from the old drive.  I didn't really expect that to work, as I
figured that there would be *some* issues.


> > If it makes a difference (my understanding is that it shouldn't), the CPU is
> > an "Athlon 64" not an Opteron.  The motherboard is a Gigabyte K8N Pro, with
> > nVidia nForce 3 chipset.
> 
> The CPU type doesn't matter (I have one Athlon64 board myself, which works
> fine). I don't think the nVidia chipset has been tested yet, maybe's there
> something in there that trips NetBSD up.
> 
> Having the video disappear is a vga issue though.. it's normal to see
> the screen 'twitch' when the native VGA driver is initialized, but
> it shouldn't go away entirely.

Then again, there may be BIOS issues.

I could also try booting from floppy, if I can get my hands on a floppy disk.
(Against my general grain, I thought it wise to have a floppy drive in this
beast for BIOS updates.)


About the best that I can do until stores open in a couple of hours is reseat
the CD's cables, I guess.  And then see if I can free up a video card.


-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/