I may have presented my question in a confusing way, mixing in 2 PCs, 2 dmesg'es and a variety of issues. Excuse me.
> it's unusual that > some ports show up under ahci(4) and some under pciide(4). You must have two > separate SATA controllers with separate config sections in the BIOS. 2 PCs, one controller per PC. 2 dmesg'es in one post. > As far as not booting from USB, you need to try booting the USB in both > MBR mode and UEFI mode. The PC with NVIDIA chipset is pre-UEFI, BIOS-only. > I think people generally avoid > Nvidia chipsets because the reputation Nvidia has for being stingy with > programming details. I suspect this is more of a problem with their video > chips than their motherboard chips >From the manpage for `nfe` — NVIDIA Ethernet device: "NVIDIA refuse to release any documentation on their products." http://man.openbsd.org/man4/nfe.4#CAVEATS So, it is about NVIDIA in general... AFAIK, chipsets deal with all 3 frontiers that I have problems with: not booting from USB, interrupt/timeout with HDD, power supply control; and the chipset is NVIDIA and again, "NVIDIA refuse to release any documentation on their products." But is it an OpenBSD-compatibility issue or does my chipset want to retire? ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ And the main question of the post: What are the dashes and the beep? They occured on an all-Intel machine, with AHCI Intel chipset.
