[IdOp]

[Historical note for future readers: Much of the discussion that follows relates to a preliminary version of the Original Post, which asked about problems booting from a SATA drive.]


Hello danboid, and welcome to daemonforums!

I've never worked with banana Pi's and such, but from your description I'm wondering if a couple of preliminary steps have been taken care of. To explain this, first a quick re-cap of the boot process:

1) BIOS reads MBR boot code, and executes it, and it has to decide to boot off the NetBSD partition.

2) BIOS boot code passes control to the primary boot loader in the NetBSD partition.

3) Primary boot loader finds the secondary boot loader, /boot, which then loads the kernel and away you go.

It seems to me your rsync operation should have copied over the secondary boot loader, so that should be there.

BUT: did you install the primary boot loader? If not this can be done using the installboot program. Check the man page for details, but you can run this from the system booted off your SD card, and tell it to put the primary bootloader on the SCSI disk partition. A typical run might look like this

# installboot -v /dev/rwd0a /usr/mdec/bootxx_ffsv2

but do not copy this blindly, you want to make sure you put the loader at the right target location (which in the example is /dev/rwd0a -- again, please consult the man page carefully).

As for the first step, is there anything in your MBR (I assume you use MBR) that will try to boot the NetBSD partition?