From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Nov 4 21: 6:13 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com [24.2.89.207]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1755114DE6 for ; Thu, 4 Nov 1999 21:06:09 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com) Received: (from cjc@localhost) by cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id AAA22650; Fri, 5 Nov 1999 00:09:09 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from cjc) From: "Crist J. Clark" Message-Id: <199911050509.AAA22650@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Subject: Re: how to boot from floppy disk? In-Reply-To: <38225247.EE0821DA@nisser.com> from Roelof Osinga at "Nov 5, 1999 04:43:03 am" To: roelof@nisser.com (Roelof Osinga) Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 00:09:08 -0500 (EST) Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD Questions) Reply-To: cjclark@home.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL54 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Roelof Osinga wrote, > Having been spoiled by slackware which sports a handy facility that > allows one to boot from a couple of floppy disks but still have the > root be the winchester, I'm wondering if such a trick can be done > with FreeBSD as well. The "Winchester?" What decade did you just walk out of? > What I've tried thusfar is to boot the kernel diskette, then let it load > the MFS root disk. At the prompt "Hit [Enter] to boot ..." I press space. > At the prompt I give "rootdev=disk1s1a:", followed by "boot -c". This > sort of works. I mean, I can eject the floppy before executing the boot > command and it'll still boot. Clearly from the winchester. > > So far so good. It breaks down after the system has been loaded. At which > time the sysinstall Main Menu comes up. I can live with that, but what I > can without is the fact that it reboots the machine upon exit. Why are you using 'boot -c'? > Even that wouldn't have been so bad had the emergency shell at least had > the decency to have the intended root. It doesn't. The fixit option is also > pretty much useless for my purposes in that it roots to the floppy disk. > > Therefore, is it possible to boot from floppy and if so, how? Quite possible. However, the boot process changed a bit from 2.2.x to 3.x, and I am hesitant to tell you what is the "proper" way to do it. The _easiest_ (possibly not most proper) thing to do is take a copy of the kern.flp floppy and mount it. Put the exact command sequence you would enter to boot the way you want (see boot(8) to figure that out) in boot.conf on the floppy. Using the boot/loader.config (see loader(8)) might be the prefered way to go now-a-days. HTH. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message