[nycbug-talk] Confusion around Grub, NetBSD 3.0, DAC960 control (all for Xen)

[Tillman Hodgson]

Hi folks,

I picked up an older VA Linux 4u rack-mount server with dual 450MHz CPUs
and a nice DAC960-based hardware RAID controller and a stack of SCSI
drives. I want to repalce some of my very-much-older hardware
(decstation, SGI boxes and sparcs, mostly) that are performing simple tasks with
this single box running Xen 2.0 (because that's what the NetBSD Xen port
seems to make the easiest option). The services are all light-weight
items (an NFS server, for example) and it makes sense to reduce my
electrical bill at home. And Xen sounds neat to play with.

I have my initial NetBSD install setup and I went to install grub. I
should note that I switched from Linux to BSD back in the ays when lilo
was the bootloader for most Linux distributions ... I've never used grub
before. In any case, I don't think I did it right :-)

The machine boots to what looks like the normal BSD bootloader, loads a
kernel, then reboots. Rinse, wash, repeat. The reboot behaviour tells me
that my attempt to install grub did /something/ to the boot sequence: it
was booting fine before. But seeing the BSD bootloader instead of a grub
prompt makes me believe that the install wasn't done right.

Is there an easy way to recover from this? My thought was to boot from
the install disk, get a shell, and re-install the BSD bootloader
somehow, and try to recover from there.

Perhaps it's an issue that I'm booting from a DAC960 virtual disk? (In
NetBSD, it's the ld0 device). I trusted grub-install to come up with the
device map, perhaps that's the problem.

-T


-- 
Scott> > > See attached.
Scott> > I didn't attach it, did I?
Scott> This is sad.
	- Scott, stuck in an infinite non-attaching mental loop :-)