>>>>> "Urban" == Urban Boquist <boquist@cs.chalmers.se> writes:

Urban> Has anyone else had boot block problems lately?

Perhaps it's the phase of the moon here in Gothenburg :-)

Seriously I'm installing a NetBSD on a P133 DEC Celebris for a
customer and did actually have problems with the bootblocks.  My
problem is rather well-defined and it seemed to be a little different
than Urban's.  The standard bootblock prints out "Read error" and the
floppy light gets lit.  When compiled with -DDEBUG it shows that it
flows into the floppy boot code even when booting from a hard disk.
Changing the probe for floppy vs hard disk boot inside the bootblock
to be unconditionally recognizing a harddisk as well as hardcoding
0x80 as the drive number before reading the second stage bootblock
made things work again.  Obviously this Phoenix BIOS don't present the
boot drive in DL to the bootblock as is customary.  However should we
really rely on that fact?  I wonder how DOS boots then?  Isn't there a
more standard way to get at the boot drive?  I haven't got a single
techref on the IBM-compatible arch, so I don't have a clue.

If you want, Urban, I can mail you my uuencoded first stage boot block
if you by any chance suffer from the same problem.  However it won't
work on floppies :-)  Maybe we could meet?  I'm going to give a book
to Christopher Ahlberg today...  Coincidence?

Niklas

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