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Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 09:33:44 +1000
From: TLiddelow@cybec.com.au (Tim Liddelow)
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To: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com>
CC: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>, abial@korin.warman.org.pl,
        current@FreeBSD.ORG, sherwink@ix.netcom.com
Subject: Re: Multiple FreeBSD Systems on a Single Disk
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Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> 
> 
> Any configuration that was broken by this change was broken such
> that the BIOS should have not even booted anything!  The BIOS should
> have returned a ``No Active Partition'', or gone on to the next
> disk drive (yes, AMI bios'es as old as 1982 can boot from drive
> 0x81 if there are no active partitions on drive 0x80.)
> 
> > This should be fixed by adding slice support to the boot loader's
> > name parser.  Then you could bounce off the first FreeBSD to any
> other
> > slice by putting a boot loader on the first slice and configuring it
> > to boot from slice sN, e.g., "0:sd(0,s5,a)kernel" to boot the first
> > logical drive on an extended slice.
> 
> Poppy cock, the active flag model should work and not require the
> addition of slice choosing support to the boot blocks.  OSBS and
> other multiboot loaders will infact set the chosen partition to
> active, it is just the brain damaged FreeBSD boot code that ignores
> the active flag, and chooses the FIRST BSD parition it finds
> no matter what, which is _WRONG_.
> 

I agree - I have a real need for this functionality right now.  It
would be very nice for the BSD boot code to check the active flag -
can this be put into -current ?

Tim.