On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 3:22 AM, Daniel Dickman <didick...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Monday, December 22, 2014, Ted Unangst <t...@tedunangst.com> wrote: >> >> On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 00:53, Henrique Lengler wrote: >> > On 2014-12-23 00:50, Edgar Pettijohn III wrote: >> >> Have you tried installing something other than OpenBSD since you ran >> >> into this issue? >> > >> > Since I ran into this issue I can't even access my bios with the HDD >> > sata connected. >> >> That can only be a problem with your BIOS. Update it? Get a better >> one? I don't know. But if your BIOS doesn't work with some drive >> attached, your BIOS is broken. > > > I just bought a system with what seems like the same problem as in this > thread (dell laptop). I upgraded the drive to an ssd. the laptop firmware > and the ssd firmware were both upgraded to the latest versions. > > with windows installed I can press F2 and get into the firmware menu just > fine. with openbsd I just get a black screen when I press F2 at boot. > > I did a test. after i installed openbsd, I overwrote the mbr with all > zeroes. when I rebooted I could access the bios menu via F2 again. > > does seem like a firmware bug based on the contents of the mbr. will see if > I can diagnose further.
After some more digging. It's not the MBR itself that's the problem. The firmware on my laptop reads all the partitions in the MBR except ones marked as type EE (EFI). It then seems to try to read into those partitions for something else. If there is even 1 OpenBSD partition, it chokes on something in it. No idea why the firmware is reading past the MBR and into the actual disk partitions, seems strange. Dunno if this helps anyone else with a similar problem, but at least for my system I know for sure it's a firmware bug.
