Dan LaBell wrote:

>
> On Mar 25, 2005, at 11:59 AM, John Clark wrote:
>
>> Apparently there have been problems with other VIA CPU's. Has anyone 
>> found a fix. The 'boot' loader
>
> Well, not a fix, but a work around:
> 1. Make a 2.0 dos boot floppy.
> 2. Replace with 1.6's dosboot.  (Dos boot is also affected.)
> 3. Install.
> 4. Redo installboot with 1.6's /usr/mdec/biosboot.sym
>
> I used netbsd-INSTALL_TINY.gz , and fit that plus a tgz with 1.6's
> usr/mdec/installboot and /usr/mdec/biosboot.sym and the man page.
> As I did this with FreeDOS I'm thinking I could upload the bootdisk I 
> used , as it is FreeDOS it shouldn't be a problem.  But as Freedos is 
> only about a 10 meg download, it wouldn't be hard to repeat my steps.


I used the advice to get the 1.6 installation, and that worked. So now I 
have a 'working'
environment and can be somewhat assured that the board is capable of 
running such things
as NetBSD and Linux.

I'm going to look into this further and see if I can instrument the 2.0 
boot to see exactly where
it is failing.

Also, on the board that I'm using, I can have the BIOS use a serial port 
rather than the video
screen, so my current NetBSD boot setup is to use the COM port as the 
console, so I can
capture any 'fleeting' message that goes by. This is not possible when 
using the video console,
and may explain some differences.

John