2001-Sep-07

My workstation has needed to boot from a floppy for most of the year; if no floppy was in, then it would just reboot and do the memory, BIOS, POST checks again (and again). When the power went out, my system rebooted constantly for 18 hours straight. I really thought this was a BIOS problem.

The funny thing is that I solved this problem before (see 20/Nov/2000 and 18/Dec/2000), but I forgot. I did learn some more about it today. The fdisk bootselector F1-F4 correspond to partitions 0 through 3. I was able to make F2 (Function key 2) boot the third partition which is also the wd0f disklabel partition with "fdisk -B" to interactively configure the bootselector and then "/usr/mdec/installboot /usr/mdec/biosboot.sym /dev/rwd0f". But I didn't need any bootselector, so I did a "fdisk -i" to remove the bootselector code (but it doesn't tell you); then did a "fdisk -B" (just so it would verify that the bootselector wasn't active).