VirtualBox

Opened 13 years ago

Closed 4 years ago

#8885 closed defect (obsolete)

Multiboot FreeBSD doesn't work because the BIOS always claims to have 1 hard disk

Reported by: mlw Owned by:
Component: other Version: VirtualBox 4.0.6
Keywords: Cc:
Guest type: BSD Host type: Linux

Description (last modified by aeichner)

I have a VM with three virtual IDE hard disks, each one containing a different version of FreeBSD. The mbr on the first disk runs grub to boot/chainload the FreeBSD boot loader from the appropriate disk. This works under VMware server.

When I tried the same thing in VirtualBox, the FreeBSD boot loader fails to detect the second and third disks, so it can't boot from them.

The problem is that the BIOS boot sequence is setting the byte at 0x0475 to 1 unconditionally in hard_drive_post even though the correct value was set by ata_detect (using the variable hdcount).

Please consider adding the attached patch.

Attachments (1)

rombios-retain-hdcount.patch (574 bytes ) - added by mlw 13 years ago.
Patch for src/VBox/Devices/PC/BIOS/rombios.c

Download all attachments as: .zip

Change History (2)

by mlw, 13 years ago

Patch for src/VBox/Devices/PC/BIOS/rombios.c

comment:1 by aeichner, 4 years ago

Description: modified (diff)
Resolution: obsolete
Status: newclosed

Closing as obsolete as we completely rewrote our BIOS by now and I can see that the FreeBSD bootloader is able to see more than one disk with a recent VirtualBox release.

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