Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:41:49 +0000 From: James Mansion <james@mansionfamily.plus.com> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org, freebsd-embedded@freebsd.org Subject: eWay 2300 CF boot problem Message-ID: <4736F88D.1020701@mansionfamily.plus.com>
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Hi, I'm trying to get 6.2R to install onto an eWay 2300 (a little system using a Vortex86 CPU, also available from Norhtec and a few other places as a thin client or PuppyLinux system). It has a number of oddities it seems. I'm trying to use a compact flash. I have a bootable CF, and I managed to get an installation of NetBSD 3.0 to run fine. With FreeBSD, I run the installation under VMWare and set up the CF. The CF will boot in VMWare. The process I used is essentially that from http://typosubmonkey.net/articles/2006/04/13/installing-freebsd-on-usb-stick-episode-2. However, I specify the root directly, not trying to use the ufs label. (Well, I tried with the label too but couldn't get that to wor) The drive is different for me since I have it in a CF-to-IDE adapter. Anyway, all seems to go well with the F1 prompt for the bootable IDE drive, then the kernel loads quite happily, loads the acpi module etc and all is well until it wants to mount the root file system. At that point, it fails after: Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a. IThe weird thing is that if I type '?' then the 'List of GEOM managed disk devices:' is empty (or shows cd0 if I have the USB CD plugged in). Its clearly come up from the CF disk, but it doesn't seem to recognise that there is anything attaached to ata0 or ata1. The hardware quirk is that the CF is the secondary on the first channel. Is it possible to convince it to probe the secondary? Installation also fails if I try to use a USB stick, claiming there is no kernel. If I press '?' it lists the directories OK. This may be down to a furter quirk - it shows USB sticks as USB floppy devices. A standard Ubuntu install goes OK (but slowly) and on reboot halts after showing 'GRUB '. To get it running with PuppyLinux its necessary to use a 'superfloppy' installation with no pertitions. I have yet to try a siilar FreeBSD installation by installing directly to sd0 (ie dd over the drive and disklabel sd0 rather than fdisk and disklabel in sd0s1). Is that likely to work? I'd rather get running from the CF. And I'd rather use FreeBSD than NetBSD since the readonly root support is handy and the Java support seems to be better, Any ideas? Thanks! James
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