View Single Post
  #9   (View Single Post)  
Old 25th July 2008
jggimi's Avatar
jggimi jggimi is offline
More noise than signal
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
Posts: 7,977
Default

Those commands are not given at the boot> prompt; they're given to a running Unix system. The boot> prompt is from the second stage boot loader, which loads and runs the kernels.

Some level setting:

When your hardware boots, the BIOS loads the Master Boot Record (MBR) from the disk drive and executes the software it finds there. A standard MBR program reads the MBR partition table, and loads and executes the Partition Boot Record (PBR) from the active partition.

This ends the first stage of booting.

If the active partition is OpenBSD, the PBR points to a file called /boot which contains the second stage boot loader. That is the program which produces the "boot>" prompt. This program allows you to select the kernel to load, among other things.

--------------

The commands you see in the first part of FAQ 4.15 are Unix shell commands to mount and write the OS's dmesg to MS-DOS diskette.

Your OS can't get that far. The kernel doesn't complete loading, and your PC reboots.

--------

IIRC, the amd64 bsd.rd (RAMDISK Kernel used for install/rescue) does not include FAT (MS-DOS) filesystem support; but the i386 bsd.rd does. If you wanted to capture an i386 dmesg -- which is similar to but not the same as an amd64 one:
  • Boot i386 install media
  • At the Install/Upgrade/Shell prompt, select Shell
  • Issue the commands shown in FAQ 4.15.
--------

You could also reinstall OpenBSD -- using the i386 architecture instead of amd64. Your CPU can run it, and ... if your problem is related to amd64 in some way, perhaps this would be a functional workaround.
Reply With Quote