On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, der Mouse wrote:

> Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 04:02:56 -0500 (EST)
> From: der Mouse <mouse@Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
> To: peter@larkowski.net, port-sparc64@NetBSD.org
> Subject: Re: bootloader problems
>
> > This question has been asked a few times, but never addressed.
>
> Never?  Heck, I alone have posted messages about it every few months
> (though admittedly I'm not certain how many of them have been on
> port-sparc64; at least some have been on port-sparc).

Fair enough.  When searching the port-sparc archives, i found more
tidbits.

>
> > I messed with it a little while and it looks like the bootloader
> > can't read past a certain block on the disk.
>
> This is reasonably likely.  Some Sun ROM versions don't know how to use
> 10-byte CDBs, and 6-byte CDBs can't access beyond the first 1G of the
> disk (a 6-byte CDB has only 21 bits of block number).  These versions
> also aren't smart enough to return errors when attempting to access the
> rest of the disk, instead just droppng the high bits of the block
> number and thus getting the wrong block.
>
> Of course, whether this is actually what's wrong in your case I can't
> say for sure, but it matches your symptoms insofar as you've described
> them.
>
> > I've reinstalled with a small / and /usr on a separate partition, and
> > my kernel that I built this morning works fine.
>
> Note that a small boot partition is not alone enough; it also must be
> early on the disk (within the first 1G).
>
> > Is this a known issue?
>
> It's a known issue with many machines.  Whether it's a known issue with
> UltraAxes I couldn't say.
>
> The ROM code version would be a useful value to report.

ok .version
Release 3.14.0 ME  created 2000/02/03 16:08

I searched for an update, but couldn't come up with much, so that could be
the only release for this board.



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