Bug 20254

Summary:	BTX loader 1.00 can not recognize floppy as boot device
Product:	Base System	Reporter:	gri <gri>
Component:	misc	Assignee:	John Baldwin <jhb>
Status:	Closed FIXED
Severity:	Affects Only Me
Priority:	Normal
Version:	Unspecified
Hardware:	Any
OS:	Any

Description gri 2000-07-28 16:10:00 UTC

When I try to boot from the installation floppy, loader reports:

"BTX loader 1.00 BTX version is 1.01
Console: internal video/keyboard
BIOS drive C: is disk0
BIOS drive D: is disk1
FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 0.7 693/64512kB
(jkh@time.cdrom.com,....)
Can't work out which disk we are booting from.
Guessed BIOS device 0x0 not found by probes, defauling to disk0: "

My computer is ALR Evolution V (EISA bus, Phoenix ROM BIOS PLUS v1.00.32B 05/25/93)

There are also AHA-1542C and AHA-1540B installed on it. So, I have 3 floppy controllers - 1 of them enabled (no matter which one) and 2 disabled.
MS-DOS, MS-Windows and Linux can use thise floppy with any problems.

Fix: 

throwaway old computers or do not use new programs :)
How-To-Repeat: reboot, reboot ...

Comment 1 Sheldon Hearn freebsd_committer

2000-07-31 10:48:19 UTC

Responsible Changed
From-To: freebsd-bugs->jhb

Over to the big knife. :-) 

John, note that it appears that this is for a 4.x install, not 
a 3.4-RELEASE install.  Also note that the Synopsis gives 
the wrong loader version.

Comment 2 jhb 2000-07-31 19:19:59 UTC

sheldonh@FreeBSD.org wrote:
> Synopsis: BTX loader 1.00 can not recognize floppy as boot device
> 
> Responsible-Changed-From-To: freebsd-bugs->jhb
> Responsible-Changed-By: sheldonh
> Responsible-Changed-When: Mon Jul 31 02:48:19 PDT 2000
> Responsible-Changed-Why: 
> Over to the big knife. :-)
> 
> John, note that it appears that this is for a 4.x install, not
> a 3.4-RELEASE install.  Also note that the Synopsis gives
> the wrong loader version.
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=20254

Having looked at it, it looks like you boot off of the floppy disk,
but the BIOS doesn't support the floppy disk in question.  We know
this because disk0 -> C: and disk1 -> D:.  Thus, both disk0 and disk1
are hard drive devices (or at least that's what the BIOS has told us).

Unfortunately, during the bootstrap, the BIOS is the only way we have
to talk to the hardware, so if your BIOS doesn't support those floppy
drives, then we can't talk to them. :(  We do assume that a B: drive
will always have a A: drive before it, so it may be something very
weird where you only have a B: drive but no A: drive.  If that is the
case, then see if you can disable such behavior in the BIOS.  The
BIOS doesn't tell us what is installed, so we just ask if each floppy
drive is valid until we find one that isn't.  This assumes that all
drives will be sequentially numbered starting at 0 for floppies and
0x80 for hard drives (which has always been the case in every PC I've
seen).

-- 

John Baldwin <jhb@bsdi.com> -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
PGP Key: http://www.cslab.vt.edu/~jobaldwi/pgpkey.asc
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.FreeBSD.org/

Comment 3 John Baldwin freebsd_committer

2002-06-03 19:23:05 UTC

State Changed
From-To: open->closed

This appears to be a weird BIOS bug.  I never got feedback from the 
originator, cannot reproduce the problem, and thus have no way to try 
to fix it.