Re: New unified amd64-install.img does not work with some older hardware

["David H. Gutteridge" <david%gutteridge.ca@localhost>]

On Wed, 2021-03-03 at 06:42 +0100, Martin Husemann wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 02, 2021 at 10:59:33PM -0500, David H. Gutteridge wrote:
> > Lenovo T420: installer image apparently not recognized, it simply gets
> > skipped after being selected to boot from.
> > HP DL360 G6: the first stage bootloader string flashes on the screen,
> > then it gets skipped.
> > Lenovo x131e: works without issue.
> 
> I would prefer if we could debug the issues instead, we will have the
> same
> problems on the upcoming netbsd-10 branch.
> 
> Do the two non working machines try to boot the combined image via UEFI
> or
> via BIOS? Do they work if you remove the EFI directory on the FAT
> partition?
> Do they work if you configure boot order to prefer BIOS over EFI?

Hi Martin,

Sorry for the delay. First, some good news. The T420 does work as-is.
I'm not sure why it didn't register the presence of the USB stick
before, but I retried with the same stick unchanged from last time,
and it worked. So I'll consider that one working.

The DL360 G6 still doesn't work, however. It doesn't support EFI at
all (there's no mention of it in the user guide, and forum posts with
questions about this say it can only boot via BIOS). I tried removing
the EFI directory on the FAT partition of the installer, and that made
no difference. As before, it outputs the "NetBSD/x86 ffsv1 Primary
Bootstrap" message, evidently tries to find /boot, and gives up at that
point, moving on to try the next boot target in sequence, without any
explanation as to why. (I then retried an "old style" 9.0 installer
image again, and that worked as before.)

Regards,

Dave