Hp TC3100 netserver

[Jeff LaCoursiere]

Ah, I meant to post an update to this thread.  I went to Manchester (sorry
missed that lunch...) with IDE drive in hand ready to do battle.  I neglected
to bring:

1. The stupid key for the case, which was of course locked
2. An IDE cable
3. Mounting hardware for 5.25" bays

Once I got beyond those three problems I investigated the BIOS options.  The
BIOS supported different boot orders including floppy, CDROM, SCSI, and IDE,
so I don't have a clue what the HP "tech note" was talking about.  At any rate
with no changes at all it booted the SCSI disk and FreeBSD easily saw and
could utilize the IDE drive.  The only funny thing was that the motherboard
had no connector for IDE1.  I stole the IDE cable from the CDROM drive anyway,
so just attached to IDE2.  Only caveat was IDE2 had no DMA support.  In my
case performance was not the issue, so it is working great!  Just hope no one
turns the case over, or the drive will bounce around inside :):):)

Truly amazing to see a 160GB partition in a PC!

j

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Bruce M Simpson wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 16, 2003 at 08:45:06PM +0000, Bruce M Simpson wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 04, 2003 at 06:41:17PM +0000, Jeff LaCoursiere wrote:
> > > that IDE is not supported in this unit, though there *is* an IDE controller.
> > > Apparently if you try to put a disk on it the BIOS will try to boot the IDE
> > > drive wether there is an OS on it or not.  Failing that it won't even try the
> > > scsi?
> > >
> > > Supposing this is actually true, would it be possible to put boot blocks on
> > > the IDE drive to force it to boot a partition on the SCSI disk?
> >
> > In theory this should be possible, but you might either have to write a
> > special boot block that knows which drive number to pass to the BIOS to
> > boot from the chosen SCSI disk, or chain a number of them together.
>
> <snip>
>
> I just found this lurking in /usr/ports/sysutils/extipl.
> See http://www.tsden.org/takamiti/extipl/
>
> Sounds like an implementation of the 'special boot block' I was groping at.
>
> BMS
>
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