A few days ago, I wrote:

> I just replaced a flaky motherboard on my P III system.  The new
> motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-6VTXE-A.  Things seem to mostly work
> fine, except for these oddities:
> 
>  - I cannot find a way to pause the CMOS start-up so I can see what is
>    reported on the screens.  With my old board, "shift pause" would
>    work.  Everything goes past very fast; it cannot possibly be doing
>    a memory test, for example.  I cannot find anything in the CMOS
>    set-up menu about power-on self-tests or anything like that.

Well, it turns out that the correct key sequence is just "pause", but
I have to hit it at exactly the right time, otherwise it is ignored.
Since this machine now starts up very fast, it would take an athlete's
reflexes to hit "pause" at exactly the right moment to be able to see
all of the messages, but at least I have now managed to see most of them.

>  - The NetBSD boot procedure itself, which usually gives me a 5-second
>    countdown, starts immediately!  This is true whether I boot from
>    disk (IDE-0) or floppy.  Hitting <space> before the bootblocks load
>    does get me a boot menu.  This is NetBSD 1.6.

I have tried:
  - touch nothing during start-up
  - change APIC to PIC in CMOS
  - try to resolve all ITQ conflicts (apparently not possible: the
    onboard stuff "moves" when I change the PCI slot IRQs)
  - specify ISA/EISA instead of PCI/PnP for all the DMA channels
    and IRQs (that *really* breaks things)
  - disable the onboard audio to get rid of one of the IRQ conflicts

Nothing makes any difference; I don't get a 5-second countdown: it
is at "0" as soon as the text appears.  I give up.  If I need to
temporarily boot from a different device, I will boot from floppy
(which slows things down enough to allow me to:) and hit space
right before the "countdown" comes up.  Weird.

>  - I don't *think* this is related, but it is anomalous.  The IDE
>    disks seem to have their handling adjusted now.  Extract from boot
>    messages:

Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org> replied:

| Hum, via chipset.
| Please try NetBSD 1.6.1, there have been fixes/improvements in VIA
| support for pciide since 1.6.

Oh, that was *just* released!  OK, I've added that upgrade to my list
of things to do.  Thanks for the note.


Anne.
-- 
Ms. Anne Bennett, as a private citizen:  anne@porcupine.montreal.qc.ca
Also reachable more officially at work:  anne@encs.concordia.ca