On Wed, 16 Feb 2000, Mike Smith wrote:
> > > The problem with the Thinkpad BIOS is where it puts the emulated floppy
> > > image's disk number - it's not in the 'normal' place, and I don't exactly
> > > know how to deal with it cleanly. If someone were to lend me a thinkpad
> > > or look at this it would be easy to fix.
> >
> > I'd like to help look at this. I have a ThinkPad 770 and it too exhibits
> > this behavior. Unfortunately it's my only laptop so I can't loan it out
> > but I certainly would like to help out if I can. I've got an
> > up-to-date -current running. What code should I look at in sys/boot and
> > how do I figure out where the Thinkpad BIOS puts the emulated floppy
> > image's disk number?
>
> You'll need a CD burner and the time & patience to produce a small number
> of coasters for this.
O.K. I've got a burner and boat loads of cheap media so no problem there.
One question though -- Once I've modified the sources as you've outlined
below, how do I make the bootable floppy image that gets written to the
CDR?
>
> In sys/boot/i386/loader/main.c:main() you will need to print the value of
> initial_bootdev, sometime after the console is initialised. From what
> I've seen, I get the impression that it will be something like 0x87.
> This is the root of the problem; floppy disks are typically numbered 0,1
> and hard disks are numbered 0x80,0x81, etc. Normally all the unit
> numbers are contiguous.
Understood (I think) :-)
On my Thinkpad I believe I've seen things like 0x8b or some such. This
will be the first CD to burn...
>
> If this is the case, you will need to modify
> sys/boot/i386/libi386/biosdisk.c:bd_init() to check whether it's scanned
> the BIOS unit number from initial_bootdev, and if not (and it's legal)
> scan it as well. Once we've 'probed' the BIOS unit, everything else
> should work correctly.
O.K. this makes a lot of sense and sounds easy.
>
> If you decide to take this on, please let me know how you go.
Will do!
>
> Thanks!
>
And thank you too!!!
Tom
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