On Thursday 26 August 2004 12:46, David Laight wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 04:20:41PM -0700, Marc Tooley wrote:
> > And I can get it to boot from CDROM, get it to install NetBSD on
> > the hard drive, and get it to tell me that everything seems to have
> > completed successfully.
> >
> > Unfortunately, on reboot it hangs at:
> >
> > Verifying DMI pool data...
>
> Since that is (apparantly) a bios message, try testing the boot
> procedure phase by phase.

So after installing Windows on the machine (briefly, briefly, honest) 
and getting it working, and seeing that it only showed the first 130GB 
or so of the 200GB drive (and learning that Windows 2000 doesn't 
actually have 48-bit addressing LBA mode) and thus verifying that it 
could run a full-fledged OS when forced to, I went home to my NetBSD 
machines and built a brand-new 2.0G-based -current system, including 
rebuilt packages and the works, made a bootable CD and re-installed on 
the bigger, faster machine.

I'm at the boot-prompt now about to install a bunch of precompiled 
packages. :)

> Try installing the mbr_bootsel code - run fdisk and give the
> partition a 'bootmenu' string [1].  Then booting should give you the
> boot menu. Press a key and something should happen (unexpected oner
> give 'error ?').

This and the below are all tremendously useful, thank you. I wasn't 
aware these options were available to me.

> If that doesn't work, double check that the bios is actually
> configured to boot off the hard disk, and that sector zero contains
> the code from /usr/mdec/mbr_bootsel.
>
> If that is ok, check that the first sector of partion 'a' (or
> whatever you root partition is) contains the start of
> /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1.
>
> There is a known bug that causes 'disklabel -r -w ...' to copy sector
> zero to the first sector of the partition - which might cause an
> endless boot loop.
>
> The bios/disk geometry problem is moot - the mbr code will use LBA
> addressing if there is a geometry mismatch.
>
> 	David
>
> [1] boot the install CD and exit sysinst...
> If you are short of commands try:
> # mount /dev/wd0a /mnt
> # chroot /mnt /bin/sh -i
> which should give you access to all the installed programs, not just
> those on the install media.