At 07:45 PM 1/21/2003 -0800, Russell McManus wrote:
>I've just picked up shuttle SS51G, which is a PC cube
>motherboard.  I've installed 1.6 sucessfully onto the hard disk
>using sysinst (everything seemed to go fine), but when I try
>to boot, I get something like this at the bottom of the screen:
>
>F1: windows
>F2: netbsd
>3

I had *exactly* the same problem (right down to the "3"!) when I tried to 
use a disk with NetBSD that had been installed using a different machine 
that set different CHS parameters for the drive - in my case, the OS was 
installed using a machine whose BIOS would only allow showing the disk as 
63 sectors * 240 heads * nnn cylinders, while the motherboard on the 
machine I planned to actually *use* the disk on was set for 255 sectors * 
16 heads (this second machine is coincidentally a Shuttle SV24, and 255 
sectors its default setting for auto-detected drives).

I solved the problem by going into the Shuttle BIOS and changing the detect 
parameters for the hard disk from "AUTO" to "LBA". This makes the BIOS 
report the disk as 63 sectors * 255 heads, which is close enough to make 
things work.

Note that if you're trying to dual boot NetBSD & Windows on a disk, both 
the #sectors AND #heads must match - even though both OSes ignore the BIOS 
values once they're running, and can correctly see all partitions, the 
NetBSD bootloader uses #sectors somewhere in its block number calculations, 
and Windows (even Win2k) uses #sectors AND #heads.

I can't understand why the BIOS makers can't agree on a standard for this. 
It makes swapping drives between machines a real pain in the ass! 
(especially if you've only figured it out after copying an entire 80GB 
drive  over to a new 120GB, and are faced with recopying everything. Grrr!)


>I did a google search for "NetBSD shuttle" and found that another
>user had to disable ultra-dma in the BIOS to get the machine to
>boot.  I've done that, but I still get the same problem.

I'm using ultra-dma on my drive (a Seagate Barracuda IV ATA-133) on the 
SHuttle SV24 with no problems (running -current as of Dec 11).


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