boot2 broken ? (booting from pst fails)

[John Baldwin]

On 11-Apr-2003 Toerless Eckert wrote:
> Has someone ever managed to boot FreeBSD off a Promise SuperTRAK SX6000
> RAID controller ? I tried all options i can think of, but it always
> failed: boot0 and boot1 work nicely, but boot2 simply hangs as soon
> as it tries to do the first bios read from the array. I am somewhat
> suspecting that this is related to the BIOS of that controller being
> offended by the environment of the btx client it's being called from
> (boot2 is the first btx client in the boot phases).
> 
> - Tried FreeBSD 5.0(release) and 4.8(release) boot1/boot2 - same effect.
> - Problem is unrelated to disk being a raid. Same effect happens when
>   simply moving a perfectly booting ide disk from a "normal" ide controller
>   to the sx6000 (hangs in boot2).
> - Windows XP boots fine off the sx6000 (also via FreeBSD boot0). Have not
>   tried other OSs like Linux though.
> - Tried all "OS" settings in the sx6000 BIOS config. No change.
> 
> - Q: Any ideas what i could do ?
> 
> - Q: Is btx actually switching to real mode for int 13 ? Could it be
>      that there's a bug in that code ?

No, we run it in virtual 86 mode, and it is likely that their BIOS
routine just can't handle that.

> - Q: Are there any alternatives how i could boot a 4.8 or 5.0 freebsd
>      solely from the disk ? (I guess i could try to install a linux and
>      then use liloboot, but that also uses the btx code from loader...)

Nope. :(  Other than get promise to fix their BIOS maybe.

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/