freebsd on i386-type internet appliance and cf card

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Steve Franks" <stevefranks at ieee.org> writes:

> So, I've installed freebsd on a compact flash card sucessfully in my laptop
> (or so it looks - sysinstall completes to /dev/ad4, copies everything, no
> errors, etc) with the regular harddisk removed (for safety, of course).
>
> Only it won't boot on the internet appliance when I stick the CF in there
> (that's it's only supported boot device).  I get the F1 - Freebsd bootloader
> prompt, then nothing more.  I let it sit for a good 10 min, just to be sure.
>
> It's a i386 compatible processor, and people have sucessfully run at least 3
> flavors of linux on it, as well as win98 from what I can glean on the net.
>
> If I restart sysinstall, I can see the partition was written, but I can't
> mount it from a running bsd machine - "incorrect superblock", which I think
> has to do with the following (aka. all or dd partitions):
>
> I tried 'all three' modes of partition - "create", "all", and "DD".  Each
> time sysinstall completes, each time F1 - freebsd, but nothing more.
>
> Used 'auto' on the label editor - the defaults seemed reasonable...
>
> Thoughts?

It doesn't sound like the system hardware is relevant; I think the
card isn't sufficiently installed to boot anywhere.  Also, you should
be able to do without the bootloader menu (although it shouldn't hurt
anything).  

Perhaps it's just a matter of the root device being wrong?  You might
need to set root_disk_unit (or rootdev or currdev) for the loader.