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

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

On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 10:14:16PM -0500, Cheng Cui wrote:
> Hello Mike,
> 
> Thanks for your previous help about the pxeboot problem on loading the
> local FreeBSD part. 
> However, neither the pxeboot62a or pxeboot72 or even several versions of
> loader including our own compiled generic loader under /boot will work.
> The bootstrap always looks itself twice and confused about the disk
> type. You can refer to the attached picture in which I used generic
> loader for FreeBSD6.4. And I guess the pxeboot72 still got confused in
> the loading process. By the way, the Sun box used 4 high-speed disks in
> RAID-0 with total volume around 500GB.
> 

This is a BIOS supported RAID (aka, "fakeraid") correct?  The bootloader
uses BIOS calls to read the disk, and if the BIOS was unaware of the striping
of the disks, bad things would happen.  But again, that would have shown up
when you booted straight through the MBR boot loader, and that works.

> Is there any further possible improvement to solve this problem or is
> this problem ignorable? Thanks a lot.
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Cheng Cui
> . Frey Computing Services Center . Baton Rouge, LA 70803
> 

At the moment, this is not ignorable.  Even if your users don't care about
running FreeBSD, the link shaping system requires FreeBSD.

I don't have the time to look into this further, so the next thing to try
is using the "Linux-based" (actually GRUB-based) pxeboot and friends.
I'll have Ryan Jackson here get you what you need to try that.