nanobsd image boot issues

[John Hein]

Rick van der Zwet wrote at 14:20 +0200 on May  3, 2009:
 > 2009/4/24 M. Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>:
 > > In message: <5aaae08a0904231438v5b655056g8852dc11f1e83987 at mail.gmail.com>
 > >            Rick van der Zwet <info at rickvanderzwet.nl> writes:
 > > : Boot delay and fail issues on various hardware using nanobsd generated
 > > : RELENG_7_1 images on a sandisk 2gb CF (SDCFH2-002G). For example while
 > > : trying to run a image on a soekris net4521 (bios 1.33) it seems to
 > > : take ages (up to a minute) to start booting. Same image supplied to a
 > > : PC (intel Pentium 1 & award bios) using a CF->IDE converter does not
 > > : seems to boot at all, neither does a net4801 (bios 1.33). Just seems
 > > : trying to find a boot loader. The net4801 even bails out after a
 > > : while. Output of fdisk of image list as follows:
 > [snip: fdisk outputs]
 > 
 > > Have you enabled packet mode for boot in boot0 with boot0cfg?
 > 
 > I did. The problems turned out to be something completely different.
 > Starting from soekris bios version 1.31 and upwards boot0sio does not
 > work anymore, freezing forever while trying to boot initially e.g. not
 > showing the following output:
 >    F1   FreeBSD
 >    F2   FreeBSD
 > 
 >    Default: F1
 > 
 > I generated my images like this:
 >    $ fdisk -i -f _.fdisk da0
 >    $ boot0cfg -B -b /boot/boot0sio -o packet -s 1 -m 3 da0
 >    $ bsdlabel -w -B -b /boot/boot da0s1
 >    $ bsdlabel -w -B -b /boot/boot da0s2
 >    $ newfs /dev/da0s1a
 >    $ newfs /dev/da0s2a
 >    $ newfs /dev/da0s3
 >    $ cat _.fdisk
 >    # 1000944 2 63 16 0 8192 0
 >    g c993 h16 s63
 >    p 1 165 63 495873
 >    p 2 165 495999 495873
 >    p 3 165 991872 9072
 > 
 > When using /boot/boot0 instead of /boot/boot0sio all seems to work
 > perfectly fine on all Soekris boards I could test it on (net4521,
 > net4801, net5501).
 > 
 > Next comes the interesting question when I use the some CF card in PC
 > is does _not_ work. I did get the output on the screen, but when
 > trying to press F1 or F2 or CR. All I got was a beep and no progress
 > forward, but just remain in the same section. Default behavior or
 > something off?

Note that 7.1 (which is what I seem to recall you're using)
changed the boot loader to use real mode (see sys/boot/i386/btx).

You could try using boot blocks from 7.0 (or 6.3) to see
if it makes a difference..