I am trying to figure out what exactly is causing my main computer to reboot itself while booting into BeOS/Haiku. I am booting off of a CD/boot floppy combination: BeOS Max CD and boot floppy with AMD processor fix, IDE replacement drivers, and RAM limiter pre-installed. I have a serial null-modem cable and another machine an I am trying to capture a serial output stream to analyze what is going on.
My problem is, I cannot see any serial output over the serial line. I have enabled serial debugging in the boot menu that pops up when you hit spacebar, and have tried every combination of the other options in that menu to no avail.
The machine listening on the other end of the serial cable is running SerialConnect under BeOS R5. I can successfully talk between the two machines’ serial ports (using HyperTerminal on XP on my main machine, and a serial port test program I wrote on my Be machine), so I know the ports work. Does the serial debug output use different settings than is advertised in the BeOS documentation? From what I’ve read, it should be 115200 bps and 8N1.
I suspect my problem with BeOS is an incompatible chipset, and I’m assuming (probably wrongly) that BeOS can’t communicate with the serial port for the same reason. Does anyone have any experience with serial debugging and can offer some tips? Or, is there a way to have the machine halt instead of reboot when it encounters fatal errors? (that way I’d at least get the last few lines of debug output). Thanks