[RoflCopter4]

This is probably going to come across as a fairly useless request for help, but I cound't find any answer anywhere, so I figured I'd ask anyway.

I installed OpenBSD for the first time a few days ago and have, to date, not been able to get it to boot. At all. It's rather strange. I have gotten FreeBSD and Dragonfly to work without much trouble, and I use Gentoo Linux as my daily OS, so I'm not completely oblivious to Unix, but it I don't quite understand what I'm doing wrong here. A big part of the problem, and of why I'm worried this post wont be helpful, is that the kernel panics so quickly after boot that it doesn't even load they keyboard driver. I can't even scroll up to read the dump info.

I installed it 4 separate times to try to resolve any obvious problems. I formatted the disk several different ways, including simply allowing the installer to make all the partitions it recommended (with the standard 4.2BSD fs), and I tried installing with both a GPT and msdos style bootloader. Nothing works.

If installed with GPT and booted straight from the BIOS screen, bypassing grub, the basic loader screen does come up, but the moment it tries to boot the kernel it panics. Grub also refuses to chainload the OS. It did actually try it a few times, after which it didn't even panic, the computer just gave up and did a hard reset (rarely a good thing). Loading the kernel directly leads straight to a coredump.

Clearly I'm doing something wrong. I tried installing the thing in a virtual machine and everything worked just fine. I have no idea what the problem here is. It seems possible that it could have something to do with mounting the root partition (maybe?), but I couldn't fathom why. fstab is set up just fine. Like I said, I also don't really know what to offer here in terms of diagnostics. I can't really get at any.