Dual-boot laptop won't boot OpenBSD after upgrade to 4.3

[kbeaucha]

I've got an HP Pavillion ZV5000 laptop that was set up to dual-boot XP and OpenBSD 4.2 using the NTLDR option. I created the second partition with gparted and changed the partition type to A6 during the OpenBSD installation.

With OpenBSD 4.2, after doing the base install and rebooting to finish configuring the system the system would hang at "root on wd0a", but a power-cycle would bring it back and get me to a login prompt. This only happened during the installation.

Doing a fresh installation with 4.3, everything seemed to go smoothly in the first phase. I copied the boot record file over again the same way I had before:

Boot the 4.3 CD
Go to a shell
Mount a USB thumb drive as /mnt
cd to /mnt
dd if=/dev/wd0a of=openbsd.pbr bs=512 count=1
cd /, umount /mnt and reboot to MS Windows, copy the file off the thumbdrive, edit boot.ini

After that I tried booting OpenBSD, but the system would always stall at the same point; "root on wd0a swap on wd0b dump on wd0b". I booted Windows again to see if it was affected, but it started fine.

I did the full 4.3 installation again. The final messages I get are:

Installing boot block...
boot: /mnt/boot
proto: /usr/mdec/biosboot
device: /dev/rwd0c
/usr/mdec/biosboot: entry point 0
proto bootblock size 512
/mnt/boot is 3 blocks x 16384 bytes
fs block shift 2; part offset 81915435; inode block 24, offset 1960
using MBR partition 1: type 166 (0xa6) offset 81915435 (0x4e1ee3b)
done.

I attempted to boot again after that. The final messages were:

viasio0 at isa0 port 0x4e/2: VT1211 rev 0x02, HM not activated, WDG not activated
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0/16: reported by CPUID; using exception 16
biomask ed7d netmask ed7d ttymask ffff
mtrr: Pentium Pro MTRR support
softraid0 at root
root on wd0a swap on wd0b dump on wd0b

I didn't save the earlier pbr that was working from 4.2, so I grabbed the 4.2 CD and reinstalled it on the OpenBSD partition, going through all the steps to set up the dual-boot as before, including copying the pbr over to root in the MS Windows partition. As before, the first boot failed at the same point with 4.2, but after a power-cycle the system came up normally.

I then went back and re-installed 4.3 over 4.2, and just left the 4.2 pbr in place on the MS Windows partition for NTLDR to use. The system would not boot at all, posting "ERR M" at boot and nothing else.

Since I still had copies of the last 4.3 pbr on the XP partition, I enabled it in NTLDR, and got the same "ERR M" message.

Going through the steps to pull a new pbr for 4.3 of the BSD partition and booting that gets me to the same point where it was hanging before.

I thought maybe it was something with my pbr file or Windows, so at one point I went in with fdisk and marked the OpenBSD partition bootable with:

flag 1

and rebooted directly to OpenBSD, but the system stopped at the same point as it did with the dual-boot/NTLDR setup.

Apart from what I've done and observed I don't have much information about why I'm having this problem with 4.3; I don't know if anything is being logged.

Hoping for suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

PS: I cross-posted this from bsdforums on the suggestion of another user; what's with the move?