Re: [Testbed-admins] Booting error in Customizing the Generic Image

[Mike Hibler <mike@flux.utah.edu>]

Let me see if I built the on-disk boot loader from our modified sources.
I suspect not.  Try downloading:

	http://www.emulab.net/downloads/freebsd-loader-6.2

and putting that into your image as /boot/loader and see what happens.
The easiest way to test it is to take that machine that doesn boot now,
boot it into the admin MFS, mount the disk and copy in the file:

	# on boss
	node_admin on pcXXX

	# on node, once it boots, login and
	fsck -y /dev/ad0s1[aef]
	mount /dev/ad0s1a /mnt
	cp NEW_LOADER_FILE /mnt/boot/loader
	umount /mnt

	# on boss again
	node_admin off pcXXX

Now the machine should reboot and try to boot from disk again.

On Wed, Oct 07, 2009 at 11:49:40AM -0700, Keith Sklower wrote:
>     From testbed-admins-bounces@flux.utah.edu Wed Oct  7 07:31:51 2009
> 
>     Something I just noticed in the output that I had not before is that
>     the boot loader appears to be reinvoked, either restarting or jumping
>     to itself somehow.  ISI/UCB had a problem like this long ago as well,
>     I think it was even on Sun machines.
> 
>     Keith Sklower, do you remember how/if it got fixed or how you worked
>     around it?
> 
> It had to do with a patch to the very low level boot stuff, originally
> to fix a problem with a hardware bios call overwriting part of the stack,
> and Mike provided a working around originally for the emluab-specific 
> pxeboot (that had bootinfo stuff added).
> 
> The same file gets incorportated when /boot/loader gets compiled, and
> I replaced /boot/loader on our FreeBSD62 images.
> 
> I don't recall which two files in /sys/boot/stand/... got modified.
> 
> Ironically enough, I'm swamped with classes today as an *undergradute*
> music major (going back part time as a 2nd bachelor's student), and just
> quick looking for fires to douse between classes.
> 
> keith.