Subject: Trouble booting
To: None <port-hp300@netbsd.org>
From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
List: port-hp300
Date: 06/22/2005 02:30:37
Thanks to a generous benefactor (you know who you are, speak up if you
want credit - I'm sure you're here on the list :-), I recently got a
98658A SCSI card to go with my hp300s.

So I dug the machine out, dusted it off, and found it refused to sync
with the monitor.  A little googling revealed I was using a 1280x1024
monitor with a 1024x768 display; using the right monitor helped
greatly. :-)

I put the disk on another machine and, after reading some code, thought
I'd figured out enough to set the disk up.  I unpacked stuff and did
the installboot by hand, and when I thought I had it ready, moved it to
the hp300.

But, as you've no doubt guessed by now, it doesna work.  Of course, one
of the plausible reasons is that I botched something when doing the
manual setup.  But I'm not convinced it's not the card itself; it shows
up oddly in the bootrom.

Upon powerup, it goes through some selftest stuff and ends up searchig
for a system, to no avail.  I wrote down what's displayed at that
point, and here it is:

+----------------
| Copyright 1985,
| Hewlett-Packard Company.
| All Rights Reserved.
| 
| BOOTROM Rev. A
| Bit Mapped Display
| MC68020 Processor
| MC68881 Coprocessor
| Keyboard
| HP-IB
| HP98620B
| HP98644 at 9
| ID39 at 14
| HP98644 at 17
| HP98644 at 18
| HP98644 at 19
| HP98643 at 21
| 6291282 Bytes
+----------------

(This doesn't include the bottom two lines, one saying that it's
searching for a system and RETURN to pause, the other suggesting
RESET.)

The card at ID 14 is the 98658A, and seeing it called ID39 rather than
98658A makes me suspect the bootroms don't recognize it and hence can't
boot from it - anyone know whether this is so?  (14 is indeed the
number set on the card's DIP switches as its id.)

Also, from years ago when I was playing with this, I seem to recall
that there's a way to get into some kind of menu of bootable devices.
I think it was something like control-return immedately upon its
recognizing the keyboard.  I've tried various combinations, to no
avail; I do know the keyboard is in at least minimally functional,
because RETURN pauses and unpauses the "searching for system", and
Reset does indeed reset the system and rerun the POST.  I did some web
searches, and some grepping over my back mail, but couldn't find
anything of use.

Any thoughts?

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