General Questions

Hi, I've been using mono for years on the gateway I've made from a P1.  I ran mono both from a CD with a floppy and from C: without any problems.  Recently, I tried to install mono on D: (the back up drive of my gateway box, it seemed to install fine).  Bios booting sequence was changed but mono cannot start from D:.  Any idea why?

 

what happens when you try to boot from d: drive ?  ( I assume you mean a secondary hard disk drive as a slave or on a secondary controller ?)

I run m0n0 on a 16MB DOM Flash drive that plugs into an IDE MB port.

It will not boot all the way in and run if it is plugged into the Secondary IDE port. It stops booting with some error related to the drive designator ad0, but I don't remember the exact message.

I think mon0 (or more likely the underlying FreeBSD) expects to be run from ad0 and pukes if it isn't there, but I don't really know.

I've never run it from HD or CD so I can't comment on those.

what happens when you try to boot from d: drive ?  ( I assume you mean a secondary hard disk drive as a slave or on a secondary controller ?)

You assume correctly    Here is what happens:

/kernel text=0x50a480 zf_read: fill error
readin failed
elf32_loadimage: read failed
can't load file '/kernel' : input/output error
|
Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt
Booting [/kernel]...
can't load 'kernel'

So, is there an easy fix for this?

Have you tried disabling the primary IDE drive/controller in the BIOS?

Steve.

No, I haven't attempted to disable 1ry IDE, just changed the booting sequence in BIOS (I am not sure if my BIOS even gives this option).  However, the whole point of putting the 2nd HD in the box is to be able to easily activate it without jumping through hoops.  If it starts to get hairy (after the failure of the 1st HD) I might as well just pop the lid and swap the drives...  Why? is BSD incapable of booting from D:?

Why? is BSD incapable of booting from D:?

It may be just the way the image was built, or possibly how it is written to disk when installed, and therefore what it expects when booting. The coders here might be able to add more.

If coders in m0n0wall could do more (and hopefully soon  ) it would be a real improvement in terms of enhancing reliability - by adding an additional layer of redundancy in gateways like mine (that was precisely the reason why I built mine that way - I just expected it would work without issues).  Please advice on the feasibility and time frame of this patch.