Damon McMahon wrote: > Greetings, > > This is quite strange: very occassionally (perhaps a rate of 1 in 25 > occasions or so?) automatic booting 3.9/i386 fails, but manually > booting via the console works. Below is the console output and other > potentially relevant information - is this faulty hardware (I suspect > it is given the problem's sporadic nature), or something else? > > booting hd0a:: open hd0a:: No such file or directory > failed(2). will try /obsd
That appears to be your problem, something is sticking random characters in when the system is expecting a kernel name to boot from. As a result, the system is trying to boot from a non-existent file rather than hd0a:/bsd Because of the info you are providing, I'm guessing you have a serial console on the system. Could the serial console device be sending random characters on boot-up? Maybe the failure is when power is interrupted, and reapplied to both systems at the same time, the OpenBSD machine is just getting to the boot> prompt as the serial console machine is initializing the serial ports (or sending other garbage over them for unknown reasons)...a normal reboot of just the OpenBSD box (or just the serial console box) wouldn't cause the problem, as the random chars come long before or long after the boot> prompt. > boot> trace > boot> ps those don't work until the kernel (and thus, ddb) is loaded. :) > boot> boot > booting hd0a:/obsd: 4966248+867848 [52+255872+237161]=0x608d04 > entry point at 0x100120 And since this works, I'm kinda inclined to believe that the HW is basically sound. IF I'm right (no promises!), a few options I can think of: 1) mess with the serial console machine's boot timing (stick an old SCSI card in it, that will add 30+ seconds to the boot time!), 2) Do something similar for the OpenBSD box (obviously, do 1 or 2, not both!) 3) use boot.conf to cause OpenBSD to IMMEDIATELY "just boot off bsd" rather than presenting you with a boot> prompt (I don't really like doing that, but it should work, assuming you never have to boot single user or bsd.rd when the system is very content to boot /bsd). 4) If the system always gets the same random char stuffed in it, hard-link the kernel to that file name (oh, that is such a lame solution!) obviously, "serial console HW that doesn't send garbage on boot" would be the best option, but it might be difficult. All this is mostly wrong if you tell me you aren't using a serial console, but looking back, I see you DID use a serial console on a similar/same machine some time back..so I suspect I might be on to something. :) Nick.
