Subject: Re: Problems booting from SCSI disk
To: Frank van der Linden <frank@wins.uva.nl>
From: John Nemeth <jnemeth@cue.bc.ca>
List: port-i386
Date: 01/27/1998 23:19:52
On Jan 27, 11:21am, Frank van der Linden wrote:
} On Tue, Jan 27, 1998 at 09:27:19AM +0000, Dominic J Hulewicz wrote:
} > I have freshly installed NetBSD 1.3/i386, and everything works fine apart
} > from booting from SCSI disk. I can boot from floppy, interrupt the loader
} > and then boot from sd0:netbsd, but it won't boot automatically.
} 
} This seems to be, unfortunately, a common problem with the 1.3 install:
} somehow it gets things wrong with Adaptec SCSI controllers.
} 
} At first I thought it was a geometry problem, but it has been suggested
} to me that the boot code in the MBR might be wrong, and this could
} be the problem.

     I just did an install this weekend using an Adaptec 1522.  Your
first thought is correct, it is a geometry problem.  sysinst wants to
use the "real" geometry, but it must use the BIOS geometry for the
disk to be bootable.  I ended up dropping out of sysinst, modifying
disktab, running disklabel, newfs, installboot, and creating
/etc/fstab and mount points.  Then I used the upgrade option of
sysinst to install the sets, via NFS.  Of course, I could have just as
easily finished the job manually at this point; but, I wanted to try
sysinst.

}-- End of excerpt from Frank van der Linden