Dell remote console

[Daniel Rogers]

On Tue, 2006-01-10 at 10:39 -0600, Michael_E_Brown at dell.com wrote:
> The BIOS always puts the F1/F2 thing last for any error during the boot
> process. It isn't probably a problem with IPMI. You should look for
> anything that looks like an error much earlier in the process.

It took a while for the full meaning of this statement to sink in.

This is ANY ERROR AT ALL.  Even harmless ones.  Even errors related to
drives not found because there is nothing connected to them anymore.
ANY THING AT ALL.

This is very annoying.  First off, it wasn't clear to me at all, that
the harmless error of a drive not being found was halting the bootup
process.  In fact the message says nothing about being related to
errors.  It declares that the "System configuration has changed" however
that has nothing to do with whether you get that warning.  My
configuration hasn't changed, I always get that error.

If I may make a feature request:

Please put
!!!ERROR!!! <err message>
any time there is a message related to an error.
and then change the wording of the halt message to:

An ERROR has been detected during boot.
Boot will aways halt here unless no errors are detected
Strike F1 to continue or F2 to enter setup

Currently it is often not obvious at all what needs to be done to get
this error message to go away.  This would at least make the problem
apparent.  If I had seen:
!!!ERROR!!! SATA0: Drive not found
!!!ERROR!!! SATA1: Drive not found

And the message as I worded it, I would have been able to fix this
problem MONTHS ago.

-- 
Daniel