Summary: "What is 'bootdev' when booting a 4/330 from sd6?" problem solved

From: Steinar Haug (Steinar.Haug@runit.sintef.no)
Date: Mon May 23 1994 - 06:26:26 CDT


I wrote:

> We have a 4/330 which until today has booted from an SMD disk on
> a Xylogics 7053 controller (booting from xy0). Today I moved the
> root and /usr file system to a brand new DEC DSP5400 disk which
> is at SCSI target 3.
...
> My problem is: I cannot get it to boot from the SCSI disk by
> itself. Ie, if I do '/etc/reboot' or just 'b' at the boot prompt,
> it will still try to boot from xy0. I am utterly mystified by
> this behavior. Can anybody give me any idea of why this happens
> and how to fix it?

The net comes to the rescue again! I received several replies, and
three of them suggested what was indeed the problem. The

        default_boot

field in the PROM was set to false, which makes the system *probe*
for a disk to boot from - and it finds the SMD disk first. Setting
the default_boot field to true solved the problem.

Thanks to:

        Tim White <tim@otis.hssc.scarolina.edu>
        John Valdes <valdes@geosun.uchicago.edu>
        David Moline <drm@gcs.oz.au>

No thanks to Sun, for the following non-informative section from
the eeprom(8) manual page:

        default_boot true or false

Not a single word about *what* the default_boot field is used for.

Steinar Haug, SINTEF RUNIT, University of Trondheim, NORWAY
Email: Steinar.Haug@runit.sintef.no



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