Chris Bagnall wrote:

>>I am having an issue with mu m0n0 box that when the PC is 
>>powered off abruptly (power loss or switch) it does not boot 
>>back in to m0n0 properly.  I have the BIOS set to power back 
>>on after a failure and that is working fine.
>>    
>>
>
>What happens on a cold boot? Does the BIOS go through its normal self-test
>procedures, or does nothing happen at all? I've had a couple of machines
>that struggle to boot after a cold start and they've normally been resolved
>by a different power supply or motherboard.
>
>If you aren't getting as far as the BIOS on a cold boot, it's very likely to
>be a hardware problem rather than a m0n0 problem. If the machine is getting
>to the BIOS on cold boot, but is failing to boot from the HDD, it's possible
>that the HDD hasn't fully spun up by the time the BIOS passes control to it.
>Some BIOSes have an option to increase the IDE drive detection timeout
>substantially. Try setting it to 30secs (should be long enough for any HDD
>to spin up) and see if it helps.
>
>Regards,
>
>Chris
>  
>
The BIOS does post just fine, counts memory, etc without issues.  I 
think you are right about the drive spin up.  I had originally thought 
it was because I set the BIOS power savings for the HDD to something 
like 1 minute so the drive will sleep after m0n0 boots, but this boot 
failure will happen even after I leave the PC off for 10 minutes.

I will check for a BIOS option to increase that time out.

It is curious that when I had Smoothwall and IPCop on the same machine, 
that I did not have that issue.  That had me thinking it might be a 
m0n0/BSD thing, but I have no proof of that.

In the BIOS, should the OS setting be 'Other' or can it be set to 
Win2000 or Win98, or does it not even matter.  I had it set to Win2000 
before with Smoothwall, etc and it was fine.  I changed it to 'Other' 
for m0n0 because I was having trouble getting the NICs to be detected, 
but those items may not have been related.  I was just trying different 
things to get m0n0 to install so that setting may not even be needed.  I 
do have the 'PNP Aware OS' set to 'N' because I think that is what does 
the trick for m0n0 to detect the NICs, so maybe this OS setting is 
giving me issues.

Thanks again,
Brian