Re: Stupid BIOS Tricks

[Nick Holland <nick@holland-consulting.net>]

Stephane I Matis wrote:
> 
> Hello folks, hope you can help.
> 
> I have an ancient but handy Toshiba T3400CT laptop, with a 520 MB drive and
> brain-dead bios. To complicate matters, the floppy drive suffers from another
> brain-damage, one that cost Toshiba a huge sume, but I digress.
> 
> So, being adventures, I have attempted to install OBSD 2.8 ... many times
> today. Basic probelm stems from the BIOS translation or lack of. Once
> OpenBSD is running, liek during install, the whole thing is fine.
>
> 1) Can I boot the kernel from a FAT partition ? Old manpage, from 2.7,
>    describes boot.com.  Is suspect it was depricated.

No.  boot.com wasn't actually in 2.7, it hadn't been in OpenBSD for
quite some time, actually, but the man page was accidentally left in. 
Yes, the program was dropped (apparently) when it was rendered
inoperable by changes in OpenBSD, not so much that it was declared a
"Bad Idea", but that it was just not maintained.
 
> 2) Can I install OpenBSD on two partitions in the 'fdisk' sense ? I would
>    thus install the very minor boot area in section understood by the
>    BIOS, about 13 MB.

Can't say I've tried this, but...(see next)
 
> 3) Can I install inside a Ontrack or equivalent LBA disk "hypnotiser" ?

Um, what are you trying to accomplish here (and what is the problem
you are running into -- symptoms, not the diagnosis)?  If you are
trying to use the entire HD as OpenBSD (and you can get the machine to
boot the install disk), there should be no problem.  I've installed
some very huge disks on some systems with very significant BIOS
limitations (i.e., 40G drive on a 504M BIOS).  Now, if you are trying
to have MULTIPLE OSs on one disk, that might get interesting, but that
is also normally solvable without any big disk work-around program...

Nick.
 

-- 
http://www.holland-consulting.net/