From owner-freebsd-questions  Fri Oct 17 11:07:58 1997
Return-Path: <owner-freebsd-questions>
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id LAA26746
          for questions-outgoing; Fri, 17 Oct 1997 11:07:58 -0700 (PDT)
          (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions)
Received: from ns2.yahoo.com (ns2.yahoo.com [205.216.162.20])
          by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id LAA26738
          for <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>; Fri, 17 Oct 1997 11:07:55 -0700 (PDT)
          (envelope-from filo@yahoo.com)
Received: (from filo@localhost) by ns2.yahoo.com (8.8.5/8.6.12) id LAA25295; Fri, 17 Oct 1997 11:06:42 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Fri, 17 Oct 1997 11:06:42 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id: <199710171806.LAA25295@ns2.yahoo.com>
From: David Filo <filo@yahoo.com>
To: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu
CC: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
In-reply-to: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971017105845.3596F-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu>
	(message from Doug White on Fri, 17 Oct 1997 11:00:25 -0700 (PDT))
Subject: Re: FreeBSD on Intel's AL440LX Board
Reply-To: filo@yahoo-inc.com
Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

> 
> > Has anyone been successful in getting FreeBSD running on the Intel
> > AL440LX motherboard?  We've tried both 2.1 and 3.0 and both have
> > problems.  Booting from floppy works fine, but booting from the scsi
> > drive (after install) either gives "read error" in 2.1 or no message
> > at all under 3.0 immediately following the normal bios stuff.
> 
> Hm, I've seen this intermittiently on some systems.  It may be that the
> bootblocks were not properly installed. Try running `disklabel -B sd0' as
> root.  
>

As discussed on hackers, the problem turned out to be that the AL440LX
BIOS does pass the correct drive info to the stage1 boot process.  I
have a hacked version of the bootblocks that works around this.  If
anyone else runs into this problem, let me know and I'll send you the
patch.  Hopefully Intel will fix this with later BIOS revs.

David