Thanks for your prompt reply. I misunderstood you last time, I thought
you were suggesting that one of the drives was defective.
I tried swapping the CDROM, but the x336 are 1U rackmounted servers, and
they use custom IDE cables. As I don't have access to any other IBM
rackmounted servers, I don't have any other devices to swap in. I could
order another drive from IBM, but as I know this problem exists for
others I think it's unlikely that this is the source and I don't think
that it's worth the cost.
Regarding your second suggestion - firstly I am in New Zealand,
secondly, the machines don't belong to my company, and we don't have the
means to buy another one. I have been communicating with IBM, and while
they are interested in knowing if this is resolved and are happy to
supply documentation, they're not interested to the extent of providing
hardware to resolve it.
While I realize it's not ideal, if it's at all helpful I can provide
access to a machine via ssh for a developer who is working on a fix.
Stephen
Uwe Dippel wrote:
On Thu, 03 Nov 2005 11:09:17 +1300, Stephen Nelson wrote:
OpenBSD can boot from cd and install from ftp successfully. However, I
cannot access the CDROM drive during the install process or from the
installed os.
I would greatly appreciate help with this. It is an important project
for our company, and if it would help solve the problem we may be able
to offer a bounty to get this hardware working.
Let me repeat my suggestion as well, then:
Open one of the boxes and swap the IDE-cable. Then swap the CD with
another drive; different manufacturer.
There is still a small chance that you ran into a bus master problem with
two devices requesting it (1030 and DVD). The latest Intel IDE-chips
are said to not support bus mastering. When the DVD is such a device,
it will bring conflicts.
I agree that the chances of the latter are low, because other OSes support
both devices. But if you're really interested, give it a go.
Or, donate one of the boxes to a developer to get it resolved ;)
Uwe
