boot failures

[Emmanuel Dreyfus <manu%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Hello

I am not sure if that belongs to port-i386 or tech-kern, since I do 
not know if it is machine-dependent or not. Sorry if I post at the
wrong place.

I experience a problem booting soekris boxes with a 64 GB compact flash:
Secondary bootstrap /boot does start and is able to see filesystem content
using ls, but loading the kernel fails either immediatly "Inapprriate file 
or format", or during the load "Input/output error". 

Reading the sources in libsa, both errors come from short reads. For
instance "Inapprriate file or format" happens when reading the ELF 
header returns less bytes than expected.

Using PXE boot I can go to multi-user. The filesystem on the compact
flash hapily mounts as root. That means there is something that bugs 
I/O donne by /boot but does not happen for kernel I/O. If I understand
correctly, the former uses BIOS. 

Any hint on how to investigate? Is that a known problem for someone, 
with a known workaround?

-- 
Emmanuel Dreyfus
manu%netbsd.org@localhost