From owner-freebsd-questions  Fri Sep 28  8:26:19 2001
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Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 11:32:08 -0400
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From: "Matt Adams" <madams@sunshine.scouts.ca>
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Cc: <madams@scouts.ca>
Subject: booting HDD unknown to BIOS with floppy
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Hello,

Until recently I've been using Linux on my 486 gateway but have decided
to, for one reason or another, to move to FreeBSD.  The old-style BIOS
absolutely refuses to acknowledge and boot the 20Gb HDD that's in the 
machine, but I've gotten around that by booting a Linux kernel from 
floppy. 

After installing FreeBSD onto this disk, I've come to the realization 
that I'm not quite sure how to boot the box anymore.  The only bootable
floppy I have is composed of the {kern,mfsroot,fixit}.flp image set.
When using Linux I'd simply prepare a LILO bootdisk that looks to mount
the root under a certain device (say /dev/hdb1) after the kernel on the 
floppy is finished (i.e. by passing the 'root=/dev/hdb1' parameter to
the kernel).  The FreeBSD slice on the 20Gb HDD set to /dev/ad1s1
and the root at /dev/ad1s1b (I hope I've expressed that right).
Is there a variable I can pass to the FreeBSD loader to specify a 
particular slice to boot from?


In a nutshell: I'm curious how I should go about booting FreeBSD on this
box.  Can I do it with the bootable floppies I have from the 4.4 release, 
or is there another way to go about this?


Thanks in advance,

Matt 
-- 
Matt Adams <madams@scouts.ca>
Information Management Technologist
Scouts Canada, National Office
Web Site <http://www.scouts.ca>


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