[9fans] Newbie can't get real hardware to boot

[9fans] Newbie can't get real hardware to boot

[Ian King]

I've just started exploring Plan 9, and I've RTFM'ed but not figured
out why I can't boot the live CD on real hardware!  I've tried it on
a number of PCs including laptops, desktops and servers, and it goes
nowhere.  I've had no problem getting this same CD (either physical
disk or ISO image, depending) to boot in QEMU, on both x86 and Mac
PPC platforms.  The platforms in question either do not have a floppy
or can't support both a floppy and CDROM simultaneously (swappable in
a laptop).

As I said, I've RTFM'ed and it seems I'm not getting far enough along
in the process to use that info.  The machines in question all
recognize the CDROM, provide a line that says "PBS1...", followed by
the Plan 9 banner, and one more line: "ELCR: XXXX" where XXXX is a
four digit hex (appearing) number.  Nothing else.

Where can I begin to troubleshoot this?  Thanks for your help -- Ian

Re: [9fans] Newbie can't get real hardware to boot

[erik quanstrom]

On Mon Jun 29 02:09:12 EDT 2009, iking@>>killthewabbit.org<< wrote:

there's your problem. ☺

> As I said, I've RTFM'ed and it seems I'm not getting far enough along
> in the process to use that info.  The machines in question all
> recognize the CDROM, provide a line that says "PBS1...", followed by
> the Plan 9 banner, and one more line: "ELCR: XXXX" where XXXX is a
> four digit hex (appearing) number.  Nothing else.
>
> Where can I begin to troubleshoot this?  Thanks for your help -- Ian

well it begins with inappropriate touching of hardware.  then the gpf
boys lead the boot loader off to infinite loop detention awating trial.  typically
the loader is executed for such behaviour.

so the question is which hardware is being inappropriately touched.

plan 9 does disagree with some older intel ide chipsets and some
newer intel pretend-ide sata.  with the newer hardware, it's best to
put the sata ports into ahci mode.

if that doesn't work, the output of lspci -nv will be useful in
evaluating potential plantiffs.  you can send me that off list.

- erik