Re: re-transmission: Re: Prepping to install

["William A. Mahaffey III" <wam%hiwaay.net@localhost>]

On 06/16/15 07:24, Robert Elz wrote:
>      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 is very plausible. It seems a bit weird that it would come to the 
screen for input before it had the keyboard working .... It was the same 
keybd I had/have been using for the rest of the install, an old PS/2 
model, *many* moons old, I don't think it had anything going that nobody 
hasn't seen before ....

>    | 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.)


Hmmmmm .... Well, I downloaded Knoppix yesterday w/ the specific intent 
of using to do just that (zap some zeros onto the 2 offending drives), 
however I am having a bit of trouble getting it onto a USB stick, no 
CD/DVD on this box .... I *am* setup to boot from USB stick 1st, but the 
'steal root' problem immediately intrudes ....


> 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


--

	William A. Mahaffey III

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