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Old 11th December 2015
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jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
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I'm sorry you're having trouble. Welcome! I'm not sure I can help from all the way over here on the other side of the Internet. There's nothing particularly special about an OpenBSD installation on an MBR-capbable architecture. However, there appear to be BIOS emulators that have trouble with it on certain EFI machines.

A typical installation deploys an MBR in LBA #0. Those 512 bytes contain a typical boot program, then a four-slot primary partition table, and the MBR 0xAA55 magic number .

The first three slots are unassigned, and the fourth slot contains the OpenBSD partition definition. That fourth slot is flagged as active (bootable), and the MBR pogram will load the PBR from the first LBA of that partition.

It's my guess -- and its only a guess -- that some firmware programmer decided they could interpret an MBR without following the decades-old standard. Perhaps it's because they expect an active partition in the first slot. If that's true, there isn't anything in the first slot (partition 0 if you're counting 0-3, or partition 1 if you're counting 1-4).

The only way to confirm this would be to edit the MBR and swap partition slots (0 with 3, or 1 with 4, however you prefer to count them), and see if the problem goes away.

To test that will require mounting the disk drive in some other hardware, such as a system that has an actual BIOS in it.

It's always possible that the vendor has noticed the error, and cared enough to publish updated firmware.
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