Re: re-transmission: Re: Prepping to install

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Tue, 16 Jun 2015 01:55:24 -0453
    From:        "William A. Mahaffey III" <wam%hiwaay.net@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <557FC6E5.7090503%hiwaay.net@localhost>

  | *Aaaaaahhhhh*, OK, I replied to that suggestion earlier,

Yes, I know, I saw your reply - that is what I was referring to.

  | my boot process hung at the point where it asked for what root drive to use,

Hung is probably the wrong word - it was just waiting for you to reply and
answer it...   Problem is that your keyboard was apparently not working.
I have seen that issue reported before, as best I can tell, no-one yet seems
to know what causes that problem.

  | That seems to be the rub, I can't boot *anything* else,

Not a NetBSD "anything else", sure, but if you set up your bios boot priority
to boot from a cd/dvd or usb stick, and put a freebsd or linux in there,
that should boot fine - they know nothing of NetBSD's raid autoconfig, and
are certainly not going to make a NetBSD partition become root.  Those
systems can dd zeroes (or any trash) onto raw drives, just as NetBSD can
(or could, if you could get a single user shell prompt.)

In a reply, Martin Husemann <martin%netbsd.org@localhost> said:

  | However, I think ramdisk based install kernels like
  | http://nyftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD/201506160230Z/amd64/binary/
  | kernel/netbsd-INSTALL.gz

  | should work: just exit the installer and manually use raidctl to unconfigure
  | the auto-root property.

I doubt that will help, any NetBSD kernel with raidframe and RAID_AUTOCONFIG,
which I think all the amd64 kernels include, is going to notice the raid set,
and make it root.

However, it might be possible to boot an i386 INSTALL_TINY - I think those
lack raidframe.   Without raidframe support, there would be no way to torn
off the root autoconfig, but it ought to work well enough to just zap the
contents of the drives and start all over again.

We really need either an amd64 kernel without RAID_AUTOCONFIG or a 
(non-interactive) boot time option that disables it, just to handle
situations like this - at least until the "find root" issue is finally
fixed sanely, if that ever happens (if it is even possible in general).

If I had any idea how the boot options were processed (the stuff that can
be passed in from boot.cfg, like the way acpi and smp can be disabled)
I'd send some code to do that - actually disabling the raidframe autoconfig
would be trivial.

kre