Hi.

  I picked up a 486/33 to use a a sandbox machine/NFS client. It's
  got four megs of RAM, and an AMI BIOS. 

  It boots fine off a floppy (1.0).

  I installed NetBSD-1.0 on my IDE drive in my 486/66 (it has two other
  SCSI drives, and runs 1.0). I used to have DOS on the IDE, which is 
  a Western Digital Caviar 2340 (a 325 meg affair..).

  The install is fine. I can boot the 66 off the IDE just fine. 
  Everything is good, just as I'd expect it to be. 

  Now. I shutdown, take the IDE drive over to the other machine (33), plug
  it in, and boot. I get the Endless Reboot thing going. The machine
  at some point indicates something like "Possible Geometry Mismatch"
  or something like that.

  The controller on the 33 is a cheapo ISA fd/ide/serial/game card.

  I've set up the drive in the BIOS EXACTLY how it is in the
  Phoenix BIOS on the 66. This includes specs

    Cyl  Head  Sec  WP LZ
    1010 12    55   0  0

  So then I boot off a floppy, (which works, see above), and 

     % mount /dev/wd0a /mnt

     /dev/wd0a on /mnt: Incorrect super block

  and the root partition seems to be corrupted. 

  The AMI BIOS on the 33 looks to be very old - the preconfig'd drives
  in there are no larger than 140 meg or so. As I say, this is a 325. 
  Is it possible that the BIOS can't handle these drive specs?

  Any ideas or comments are welcome.

Thanks, Colin.


-- 
Colin Bradley
fox@cs.mcgill.ca fox@bunyip.com
http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~fox
"Don't thank me - thank the moon's gravitational pull!"