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

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

On Fri, 2021-03-19 at 18:34 +0000, maya%NetBSD.org@localhost wrote:
> Hi David,
> 
> 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.
> 
> FreeBSD gpart has a "lenovofix" with this description:
> 
>      lenovofix   Setting this attribute overwrites the Protective MBR
> with a
>                  new one where the 0xee partition is the second,
> rather than
>                  the first record.  This resolves a BIOS compatibility
> issue
>                  with some Lenovo models including the X220, T420, and
> T520,
>                  allowing them to boot from GPT partitioned disks
> without us-
>                  ing EFI.

That's interesting. I found ultimately I could get the newer installer
to work with my T420. It seemed it randomly wouldn't get picked up or
would. Which is probably different from above? (I chalked it up to
flakiness of some kind.)

> > HP DL360 G6: the first stage bootloader string flashes on the
> > screen,
> > then it gets skipped.
> 
> This one is interesting because we are already in NetBSD code that
> is failing to do the right thing.

I also tried yanking the USB drive out in the period between the
bootloader message and it moving on to try netbooting (next on the
boot order), and then it complained about not being able to find /boot.
So it seemed as if it was stuck somewhere around that point. I think
maybe there's additional console output, but it's getting garbled.

Martin is going to send me some files to try and get more verbose
output, so hopefully we learn something from that.

Thanks,

Dave