[rescue] Down on a holiday weekend and can't get V100's to boot: IDE bus issues?

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 10:35:13AM -0400, Jonathan Katz wrote:
> Use "show devs" to list the OBP paths you can boot from; one of them
> will be the CDROM and then boot from that path.

I'm working my way through that now.  It seems pretty likely that there's
a mis-association between the OBP's idea of where hardware is and where
it really is.   I did note that "boot cdrom" doesn't result in even a
flicker of the CDROM drive light -- and that light is known-good -- so
this suggests that OBP isn't even looking at the drive.

> Awesome reference below.  [snip]

Yes it is -- already snarfed and copied to three different devices. ;-)

Further update: one of the two systems I'm working on happens to have
a bootable disk in it, as I found out while fooling around with "boot disk0"
and similar.  (Not my install, this is a leftover from the previous owner.)

I now have  that system up and running OpenBSD 3.9 in single-user mode --
which doesn't help that much toward getting OpenBSD 5.0 installed, but it
has let me do one thing: test the CDROM.   I popped in a Solaris 2.7 CD
(first thing I found) and yep, I can mount and read it.  So this would
seem to indicate that I've got good cabling, good power, and a working
CDROM drive.  What I don't know (to Patrick's point in his followup) is
whether that drive will function okay as a read-only device while it's
a secondary master *but* won't boot the system while that's so.

Further OBP self-education and experimentation commencing momentarily.

Thanks,
---rsk