Re: Trouble booting an IBM 7248 after installation

[Andy Ruhl <acruhl%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 10:45 PM, William Orr <will%worrbase.com@localhost> 
wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I’ve *almost* successfully installed NetBSD on my IBM 7248. My system is a 
> little special though - the SCSI drive that it had was bad, so I instead 
> installed on a CF Card that’s plugged into the IDE controller. The 
> installation of NetBSD went beautifully, however I can’t boot my system.
>
> The SMS sees the CF card as a bootable device, and when booting to it, the 
> serial console hangs and the system never comes up. There’s no real activity 
> happening on the CF card.
>
> I then tried creating a netbootable image with the hope of netbooting into my 
> installed system. I booted up the installer again, and dropped to a shell. I 
> chrooted into my system and did /usr/mdec/mkbootimage -m prep -b 
> /usr/mdec/boot_com0 -k /netbsd boot.fs and tried netbooting again. The system 
> grabbed it via tftp, but it hung afterwards. Again, there were no reads on 
> the CF card.
>
> It’s worth noting that the CF card is 8GB, and SMS only sees it as roughly 
> 3.7 GBs.
>
> Here’s the partition table:
>
> # fdisk /dev/wd0
> Disk: /dev/wd0c
> NetBSD disklabel disk geometry:
> cylinders: 15538, heads: 16, sectors/track: 63 (1008 sectors/cylinder)
> total sectors: 15662304
>
> BIOS disk geometry:
> cylinders: 975, heads: 255, sectors/track: 63 (16065 sectors/cylinder)
> total sectors: 15662304
>
> Partitions aligned to 16065 sector boundaries, offset 63
>
> Partition table:
> 0: Linux/MINIX (sharing disk with DRDOS) or Personal RISC boot (sysid 65)
>     start 63, size 9800 (5 MB, Cyls 0-0/156/35), Active
>         PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0x00)
> 1: NetBSD (sysid 169)
>     start 9863, size 15652441 (7643 MB, Cyls 0/156/36-974/237/63)
>         PBR is not bootable: All bytes are identical (0x00)
> 2: <UNUSED>
> 3: <UNUSED>
> First active partition: 0
>
>
> And the disklabel:
>
> # /dev/wd0c:
> type: unknown
> disk: TS8GCF133
> label:
> flags:
> bytes/sector: 512
> sectors/track: 63
> tracks/cylinder: 16
> sectors/cylinder: 1008
> cylinders: 15538
> total sectors: 15662304
> rpm: 3600
> interleave: 1
> trackskew: 0
> cylinderskew: 0
> headswitch: 0           # microseconds
> track-to-track seek: 0  # microseconds
> drivedata: 0
>
> 8 partitions:
> #        size    offset     fstype [fsize bsize cpg/sgs]
>  a:  15127056      9863     4.2BSD   2048 16384     0  # (Cyl.      9*-  
> 15016*)
>  b:    263088  15136919       swap                     # (Cyl.  15016*-  
> 15277*)
>  c:  15662304         0     unused      0     0        # (Cyl.      0 -  
> 15537)
>  e:      9800        63       boot                     # (Cyl.      0*-      
> 9*)
>
> Any help would be very much appreciated.
>
> Thanks!
> William Orr

Sorry, I meant to reply to this a few days ago.

I had one of the consumer IBM PowerPC machines (that would run NT and
MacOS as well as AIX) a while back and I was playing with NetBSD on
it. Maybe it was the same machine as yours.

The IDE adapter never worked for whatever reason. After a few small
problems I was able to netboot it with an NFS root, and I think it
worked with a SCSI disk.

It's probably worth booting with an NFS root just to make sure the
rest of the machine works. Have you tried this?

Andy