installing 4.9-stable on Sony Vaio TR2A

[Lamont Lucas]

Hi guys.  I've been trying to install freebsd on a new Sony Vaio TR2A
and ran into some problems getting it to boot after install.  I was
hoping someone could look at what I've done and suggest additional
debugging or point out any mistakes.

Initially I tried installing from 4.9 release cds, but that failed as
the ide controller wasn't recognized.  So I looked around and found
a 3 line patch submitted in september that allowed the controller,
an "Intel 82801DBM IDE" to be picked up.  

The patch and bug report are located at:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-i386/2003-September/000325.html

So having applied that to my local 4.9-stable tree, I made release and
used the miniinst disk to install onto a second partition of my
laptop.  (FYI, the disc1 dosen't seem to build, but I think I saw someone
else mention that on -stable).  The install completes successfully, and
as I'm trying to boot into a partion located well beyond cylinder 1024,
I reran the boot0mgr with the -B -o packet options in order to allow
it to boot.

The problem is that it dosen't boot.  Specifically, the boot manager comes
up ok, then I select F3, the freebsd option, the laptop thinks for less
than a second then flashes part of the bios splash screen and sends me right
back to the boot manager.  That cycle continues endlessly unless I stop it.

Now pressing F2 happily gets me back to the Windows XP partition, which
works fine.  

Can anybody suggest additional information I could gather or things I
could try?  My end goal is to be able to boot into freebsd as well as
to be able to run it under vmware, but I'd be happy if I could just get
freebsd to run.  


-- 
 - Lamont
"I am not an atomic playboy."