> Anyone here had a chance to try a Dell E4300? It's a nice, compact system, > but it really refuses to boot Plan 9: > > It has on-board SATA hd, SATA cd-rom, etc. I tried quanstro's 9atom.iso, and > with the SATA controller in AHCI mode, it'll start booting, but hangs at: > > 45555 => 818807+1020832+474972=2314611 > entry: f0100020 > > Plan 9 > > In modes other than AHCI, neither the "stock" or quanstro's cd's will > recognize any devices other than fd0, and even then won't boot from it.
i think there's a good chance things can work. clearly we're relatively close to booting, because we've gotten this far. my semi-educated guess here is that either we've done something antisocial in 9load that has corrupted some SMM mode memory. the leading potential culprit here is ahci. or that some SMM-driven device, like a usb mouse that is presented to the os as a ps/2 mouse is messing up. the easiest debugging step is to turn off usb completely. also, make sure to check for bios updates. do you have a cpu server? is your laptop PXE bootable? even a useable network card would work. if so, it will be much easier to narrow down the problem quickly. > > The "stock" cd will hang here in AHCI mode: > > PBS1... > Plan 9 from Bell Labs > ELCR: 0C08 > pcirouting: South bridge 8086, 2917 not found i'll add this southbridge to my cd. this will definately not hurt. could you send me pci output? if you use lspci from linux make sure to use -vn so the vid/did appear. the descriptive strings are fairly useless. - erik
