Booting on VT6306 (VIA Fire II)

[Kevin Roettger]

Hello,

I am trying to boot a FreeBSD system attached to a VIA Fire II (VT6306) PCI 
card. The external drive has an Oxford 911 bridge.
My mainboard is an A7V8X-X which does not support Firewire nor USB HDD boot 
(USB FDD only).

The goal is to boot on that external drive without any other drives present (or 
anything internal for that matter). 

The only valid alternative I found was to use PXEBOOT (just for bootstrapping): 
I first used it with the FreeBSD loader but it would not see the drive either. 
A note about this: FreeBSD supports the VIA Fire II drive just fine... once the 
kernel is loaded from an internal drive (what I mean is that the card works and 
there are no connection/cabling problems).

So, I tried using GRUB2 on PXEBOOT hoping it would be able to see the drive.

GRUB2 starts successfully, all *.mod, *.lst files are there and GRUB2 actually 
works fine. But even when trying "insmod pci" or "insmod scsi", an "ls" only 
returns (pxe)...

It is even possible do to what I'm trying? Should I try using GRUB legacy?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks
Kevin