Subject: Re: Booting without video card....
To: Eric Delcamp <e.delcamp@wanadoo.fr>
From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr>
List: port-i386
Date: 12/04/1999 16:07:32
On Sat, Dec 04, 1999 at 12:13:29PM +0100, Eric Delcamp wrote:
> Hi !
> 
> My video board failed on my NetBSD/i386 firewall. This machine does'nt have
> a monitor, just a keyboard (why ?) and network connections. If I reboot it
> (with the same kernel), NetBSD stop after loading kernel (sorry, can't get
> dmesg, because I have only 3 ISA slots and only a ISA spare video card. So,
> I have unplugged my SCSI card to boot the machine, but loose the disk where
> tcsh is, and I could not log in ;-)
> My questions are :
> - Is a video card absolutly necessary to boot NetBSD ?

Never tried it, but there is support for serial console on i386, so I guess
it should be possible to build a kernel that works without a video board.
My guess here would be that the kernel is confused because it doesn't have
any console at all.

> - Is a keyboard necessary to boot ? I think I can disable the "stop on
> errors" in the BIOS.

No, I do have machines which boot without keyboard.

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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