machine won't start

[Sascha Wildner]

On Wed, 04 Jul 2012 12:16:25 +0200, Carsten Mattner
<carstenmattner at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 11:30 PM, Sascha Wildner <saw at online.de> wrote:
>> On Tue, 03 Jul 2012 23:15:47 +0200, Carsten Mattner
>> <carstenmattner at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I tried to install dfly 3.0.2 on an old amd64 box.
>>>
>>> When setup was in the configuration phase it didn't allow setting
>>> passwords with : or other characters.
>>>
>>> At that point I hit hard (cold) reset and since that time the machine
>>> won't leave the BIOS startup phase (POST?).
>>>
>>> Took out the CMOS battery for a minute to no avail. Anything else I
>>> should try? Is it possible that the ROM or CPU has been damaged by
>>> the installer? I can't even get into the BIOS via DEL.
>>> I'll take out the CMOS battery overnight and try tomorrow.
>>>
>>> Thanks for any help.
>>
>>
>> It sounds like http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org/issues/989
>
> Sascha, is it be safe to assume that once I've made the
> disk functional NetBSD, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD would not have
> the problem? I'm not sure after reading the bug report.

I don't know about *BSD's behavior.

What you _can_ do is to use one of the scripts provided in  
/usr/share/examples/rconfig that we ship. hammer.sh is for a normal  
install, so I'd use that. Note that it assumes you want to install  
DragonFly to the whole disk.

Just boot the CD/IMG and login as root and copy one of the scripts to your  
home directory. Then edit it, supplying your disk name at the top. Also  
make sure that you change all instances of 'fdisk' to 'fdisk -C' (as  
mentioned in the issue #989). Once you've reviewed your changes, run the  
script (beware, it's a csh script, even though it's named '.sh'; yes I  
know it's silly...) and cross your fingers. :)

If the issue is what is described in the bug report, you should have a  
system that boots.

Sascha