Re: Boot fails on Sun Ultra 45

[Steve Dibler <sdibler%gmail.com@localhost>]

Thank you for this idea.  I saw some posts about earlier Sun Ultra
models having a limit of 4 gb for the root partition. I reinstalled
with a boot partition of 4 gb, and the firmware was able to find all
the files it needed to boot successfully.  Thanks to all for your
help.

On Sun, Apr 6, 2025 at 8:49 AM Julian Coleman <jdc%coris.org.uk@localhost> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> > Solaris 10 that came with the machine boots fine on a 250gb spinning hard drive.
> > I also got OpenBSD to boot from a 250gb SSD.
> >
> > Is there something I can do differently to get NetBSD to boot successfully?
>
> > > Can you show the kernel output (dmesg) from the installer when it probes
> > > the SSD? I wonder if there is something strange like a 4k block size
> > > and the bootblock and firmware not agreeing on that.
>
> > sd0 at scsibus0 target 0 lun 0: <ATA, Samsung SSD 870, 2B6Q> disk fixed
> > sd0: 465 GB, 476941 cyl, 16 head, 127 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 976773168 sectors
> > sd0: tagged queueing
>
> I wonder if there is a limit (e.g. 128GB) for the boot partition, and if
> we happen to put the bootloader after that, but Solaris and OpenBSD put
> it earlier.  The easy way to test would be to create (e.g.) a 120GB root
> partition.  If that doesn't work, we'll probably need to add some debug
> to the boot block:
>
>   https://nxr.netbsd.org/xref/src/sys/arch/sparc/stand/bootblk/bootblk.fth
>
> I wonder if booting with "boot-debug?" set would help?  Is that boot -V?
>
> Regards,
>
> Julian