Re: flood of dashes and a beep ??? what are they?

I may have presented my question in a confusing way,
mixing in 2 PCs, 2 dmesg'es and a variety of issues. Excuse me.

> it's unusual that
> some ports show up under ahci(4) and some under pciide(4). You must have two
> separate SATA controllers with separate config sections in the BIOS.
2 PCs, one controller per PC. 2 dmesg'es in one post.

> As far as not booting from USB, you need to try booting the USB in both
> MBR mode and UEFI mode.
The PC with NVIDIA chipset is pre-UEFI, BIOS-only.

> I think people generally avoid
> Nvidia chipsets because the reputation Nvidia has for being stingy with
> programming details. I suspect this is more of a problem with their video
> chips than their motherboard chips

From the manpage for `nfe` — NVIDIA Ethernet device:
"NVIDIA refuse to release any documentation on their products."
http://man.openbsd.org/man4/nfe.4#CAVEATS

So, it is about NVIDIA in general...

AFAIK, chipsets deal with all 3 frontiers that I have problems with:
not booting from USB,
interrupt/timeout with HDD,
power supply control;
and the chipset is NVIDIA and again,
"NVIDIA refuse to release any documentation on their products."

But is it an OpenBSD-compatibility issue
or does my chipset want to retire?

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And the main question of the post:
What are the dashes and the beep?
They occured on an all-Intel machine, with AHCI Intel chipset.