From nobody  Thu Oct 16 03:40:10 1997
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Date: Thu, 16 Oct 1997 03:40:10 -0700 (PDT)
From: filo@yahoo-inc.com
To: freebsd-gnats-submit@freebsd.org
Subject: AL440LX board will not boot from a freebsd-dedicated hard drive
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>Number:         4775
>Category:       i386
>Synopsis:       AL440LX board will not boot from a freebsd-dedicated hard drive
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       critical
>Priority:       high
>Responsible:    freebsd-bugs
>State:          closed
>Quarter:
>Keywords:
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Thu Oct 16 03:50:01 PDT 1997
>Closed-Date:    Sat Oct 18 14:48:43 MEST 1997
>Last-Modified:  Sat Oct 18 14:50:16 MEST 1997
>Originator:     David Filo
>Release:        2.1, 3.0
>Organization:
Yahoo! Inc.
>Environment:
FreeBSD fb21.yahoo.com FreeBSD 2.1-STABLE #0: Mon Jul 21 11:13:11 PDT 1997 root@fb21.yahoo.com:/usr/src/sys/compile/YAHOO i386

>Description:
The latest BIOS from Intel for their AL440LX board does not pass the
drive number in %dl as biosboot/start.S assumes (instead %dl is set to
0).  The end result is that you cannot boot from a harddrive if you're
not using slices.  Booting from floppy works fine and using slices
with bteasy works as well.
>How-To-Repeat:
Install FreeBSD on a drive and dedicate entire drive to FreeBSD
(i.e. do not use slices).  Try to boot an AL440LX board with this
drive.  It will fail after BIOS with "read error".
>Fix:
Forcing %dl to $0x80 (which is what bteasy appears to do) solves the
problem.  Not sure what the real fix should be.
>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
State-Changed-From-To: open->closed 
State-Changed-By: joerg 
State-Changed-When: Sat Oct 18 14:48:43 MEST 1997 
State-Changed-Why:  

I think the dsicussion in the lists has clearly proven that this BIOS 
violates the specs.  Jordan has already mentioned the problem in the 
documentation, so i think this is by now all we can do about it 
without breaking the bootstrap for those 99 % of BIOSes that do adhere 
to the specs. 
>Unformatted:
