Figured I'd send out the results of this weekend's work ... I still
haven't gotten to the bottom of why this is happening, but here goes
nothing:

Verified 100% that I was installing NetBSD on the primary master (hd0a). 
After verifying this, I disconnected that hard drive and left the primary
slave connected.  I then powered the machine on, noting that the drive was
still listed as the primary slave (I had forgotten to configure the jumper
on the drive).

So on a whim, I installed NetBSD on what was at that time the primary
slave.  It still listed it as hd0a, but installed fine.  After I rebooted,
I made sure to check that my BIOS was set to boot HDD-1 instead of HDD-0,
figuring that it would think the slave was 1 and not 0.  This resulted in
the same error that I had received earlier.

I then went back into the BIOS and changed it to boot HDD-0 and this time,
it worked!  NetBSD booted up just fine with this configuration.

Thinking that I may still have some kind of hardware instability I got the
kernel and userland sources from CVS and even rebuilt my kernel for SMP,
booting up under the new kernel just fine.

Can anyone give me any insight as to what may have happened?  Bear in mind
that with the original configuration (both drives connected, booting off
of the primary master) Linux was running just fine.  The power supply in
the machine had died several months ago and I had just only gotten around
to replacing it.  The hardware seems to be stable other than this
behavior.  Also bear in mind that, before I set up NetBSD, I was able to
boot into my old Linux configuration just fine.


> On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 07:24:11PM -0400, Scott Crumpler wrote:
>> I'm trying to do a fresh install of NetBSD 2.0 on a machine I have
>> sitting
>> around... I can boot into NetBSD for the installation, all of the
>> packages
>> seem to install fine but when I try to actually boot the system up after
>> installing I get a "No operating system found" error.
>>
>> Any ideas, or is it a hardware problem?
>
> Did you decide that you didn't want wd0a at the start of the mbr
> partition?
> Changing that (which is quite hard work!) will make the boot difficult.
>
> You should be able to get the system running by interrupting the 10 second
> countdown when booting from the install CD and typing 'boot hd0a:'
>
> Then rerun check the mbr partitions (with fdisk) and the netbsd label
> (with disklabel) to see which partition is at the start of the type 169
> netbsd partition.
> It should start with the contents of /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1
> (excpet that the second sector is the netbsd label).
>
> To re-write it use:
>     installboot /dev/rwd0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv1
>
> 	David
>
> --
> David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk
>