AROS has started wigging out on me :-(

[that_punk_guy]

I used to be able to boot AROS from a CD on this P3-550 machine... Tried it as soon as I got the machine, and all that I've done since then is install QNX, BeOS and Mandrake Linux on it, along with Smart Boot Manager.

AROS starts booting but keeps tripping up and starting again. I get the 'Interrupts redirected, reallocating ExecBase, clearing fastmem... OK' followed by a bunch of stuff that I don't get much chance to see... IDE unit info, Floppy detected as a 1.44MB drive, then a few lines that start with 'Kbd'. That's as far as it gets - sometimes you can just see an error flash up (a guru, sometimes something about CPU defend (??) or garbage.)

Since each attempt at booting seems to get just past the stage of keyboard initialisation (I can type stuff and get what looks like debug info on keypresses echoed back for a split second) I started to wonder if it was my dodgy KVM or keyboard, so I removed the KVM and plugged my old monitor in, tried with two different keyboards, but with the same results.

Is it possible that my strange HD partition table could be to blame? (Sort of a mess, a QNX partition, two BeOS partitions, Mandrake in an extended partition, Smart Boot Manager in the MBR, which retained Mandrake's LILO MBR installation somewhere... it works, wherever it is ;-))

Does the data on the HD really matter if you're booting AROS from CD?

Tried it with the 23rd May 2003 and 13th September 2003 snapshots, and the latest (21st November) nightly build. Same results, slightly different messages.

[that_punk_guy]

Nope, same card (ATI Rage) that I've used in this machine and an identical one (I'll try booting on that one, but as a last resort 'cause it's my webserver).

Well, I get the debug info if I choose VGA or VMWare. If I choose a VESA mode the screen appears to change resolution (you know how sometimes you can just tell, even though it's a black screen, that something's happening?) but I get a blank screen.

I figure it's having the same problems behind the scenes judging by the matching disk activity patterns (floppy light stuck on, HD flickers twice every 3 or 4 seconds.)

Perhaps I'll rip the HD out then ;-)

[that_punk_guy]

that_punk_guy wrote:
HD flickers twice every 3 or 4 seconds.)

Actually that could be CD access, the HD light seems to flicker when the CD is accessed on the machine in question.

Well, the May and September builds boot okay without the HD present. Very strange. The newest nightly build still doesn't but that could be a case of badly burnt, ancient CDRW, I'll try it from a CD-R.

[that_punk_guy]

bloodline wrote:

When did this start happening? The hard dive and file system have been improved a bit in the last few months...

On friday, I tried the latest build and found that it worked fine on my Athlon and my P4... I even tried the HD install and that worked perfectly... (For the first time I might add :-D )

Well I hadn't tried booting AROS since before messing with my HD, putting QNX etc on there. The same two snapshots that worked before work fine without the HD present, the 21st November build doesn't work either way :-(

I'm gonna keep fiddling around, I'll post back here if there's any progress...

[that_punk_guy]

bloodline wrote:
Chris!!!

Matt!!! ;-)

I've just tested 21st Nov 03 one and the same thing happens to me as you describe!!!!

Won't boot on my Athlon box either, must be a broken build. Looks like my weird HD thing is a separate issue.

On a slightly different note, which version did you manage to get installed?

[that_punk_guy]

Cheers Matt :-D

[that_punk_guy]

Got it installed :-) (Well nearly... I gather there's supposed to be a bootloader, but I'm still booting from CD. HD boots from a soft reset okay though. Not sure where I went wrong but I'll try again.)

When I wiped the drive of all its partitions and MBR, all the builds worked again (minus the dead one)... I've got some info on the partitions saved here, if it's of any use to help figure out how it came about? :-)

[that_punk_guy]

I know, but it doesn't ;-) to experiment, I booted from a Win98 recovery disk and formatted c: /s, so you get a DOS prompt when you switch on. Installed AROS, but when I boot I still get the DOS prompt... which is quite disturbing, really.

[that_punk_guy]

bloodline wrote:
Just woken up Chris? ;-)

How did you know? :-D I woke up surrounded by fairy lights, it was quite ethereal :-)

Well it shouldn't. the DOS partitino shoudl be dead. Open HD toolbox and destroy the partition totally. then build a nice RDB partition on the drive and try and instal again.

you WILL have AROS booting off a hard drive :-D

I hope so :-) Been drinking so much cola while I wait, I think I might burst ^_^

How does one obliterate the partition? ;-) I tried switching to MBR, writing the table, rebooting, then switching back to RDB (so there was an RDB but no partition defined), running the installer. Should work? We shall see :-)

[that_punk_guy]

*sigh* non-system disk or disk error

:-(

Maybe I should learn some more about this stuff before I continue further ;-)

[that_punk_guy]

25-Nov-2003 build boots fine here :-)

[that_punk_guy]

Well, the drive's been wiped, but i'll see if I can trip it up with a similar setup and post back. :-)

Edit: Haven't managed to get it right yet so that it freezes the old builds so I can then check the new build, I think the only way might be to install the various OS I had on there before, will take quite some time ;-)

[that_punk_guy]

falemagn wrote:
Thanks, your effort is very much appreciated :-)

Well, I'm a crap coder so I should make myself useful somehow! ;-)

The results are in and it's bad news I'm afraid :-( I managed to recreate the conditions which stopped AROS booting, and it still affects the 25th November build. I've got the latest (26th) downloading now, will test it in the next hour (I have replace the machine's FDD first because of a freak accident I've just had.)

I think I've narrowed it down somewhat though. This is the order I did things in:

Installed QNX, made a BeOS partition and a FAT32 partition. Put WinME on the FAT32 partition so I could install BeOS from Windows, installed BeOS, then Mandrake Linux. At this point AROS is still booting from CD with no trouble. However Mandrake's LILO overwrites QNX's boot selector and I couldn't for the life of me get LILO to boot QNX or BeOS (although it would boot Windows.)

This is where Smart Boot Manager came in. When you install SBM in the drive's MBR, it keeps the original MBR someplace (is there room in the MBR for both?? I don't know but it's all I can think of...) so that if you choose 'Previous MBR' at the boot selection screen, LILO comes up and you can load Linux.

As soon as SBM's installed, the AROS CDs won't work.

You can find SBM here.

Hope this helps in some way :-)

[that_punk_guy]

Update: Affects 26th November build too. :-(

[that_punk_guy]

bloodline wrote:

that_punk_guy wrote:
Update: Affects 26th November build too. :-(

So it seems that SBM is causing the problems right?

Yeah, although I still don't understand why. I have the BIOS set to boot from CD-ROM as the first priority, it shouldn't (and as far as I can tell, doesn't) even look at the drive's MBR.