Re: Latest MFCs break boot on amd64 notebook.

In message <20040904051049.DWQM14580.out011.verizon.net_at_outgoing.verizon.net>, 
Andrew Lankford writes:
>Unfortunately, due to either a mistake on my part or a spiteful Makefile, /boo
>t/kernel.old/ is totally gone.  I wish it wasn't, otherwise I'd be able to loo
>k at the contents of my root partition more carefully.  As you suggested, /boo
>t/loader.old works almost as well as /boot/loader but the old version doesn't 
>allow me to load/unload modules like I can with the new version.  But it doesn
>'t matter whether I'm using /boot/loader.old or /boot/loader.  As soon as I ha
>ve /boot/kernel/kernel loaded into memory and tell it to boot, the "-\|/" twir
>ley spins for a fraction of a second, freezes, and the computer powers down a 
>few seconds later.

Thanks for these details. The fact that the kernel copyright messages
etc don't get displayed even with the old loader makes it seem
unlikely that it is a direct problem with the module preloading.
Maybe the kernel itself is corrupt - this could happen for example
if the system did not shut down cleanly immediately after writing
it to disk. Does the "lsmod" loader command display sensible results
after "load /boot/kernel/kernel"? If ACPI causes problems, you can
also check with lsmod that you haven't accidentally compiled it in.

In theory it should be possible to load the kernel from the compile
directory by giving the loader the full partition-relative path,
e.g
	load disk0s1e:/obj/usr/src/sys/amd64/compile/MYCONF/kernel

where "disk0s1e" is your /usr partition and the path is the compile
directory relative to /usr. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work
for me, so it may not be much help.

Ian