Re: Booting on VT6306 (VIA Fire II)

[Michael Evans]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 12:30 AM, Kevin Roettger <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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
>
>
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>

Grub has to be loaded before it can be effective; even then grub uses
the bios calls to access the data on whatever drive it's configured to
address (via bios drive instance) to load the kernel, initrd, or do
anything else.

If your bios can 'boot' off the drive in question, or your add-in card
has sufficient support for that, then configure your system so that it
reads from the drive you want.  You /may/ have to inform grub that
it's installed on (hd0) at whatever the 'in configuration system'
block device file via a device.map (as I elaborated only a few hours
ago in another reply).

On the other hand, if your bios can't bootstrap off the drive you want
there's obviously no way that /grub/ could help with that.