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From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org>
Date: 21 Jul 2005 10:25:58 -0400
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Subject: Re: /boot on a separate partition
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Ross Kendall Axe <ross@axe.homelinux.net> writes:

> Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> > At 9:30 PM +0100 7/18/05, Ross Kendall Axe wrote:
> > 
> >>
> >> ... I want to place the /boot directory in a small 25MB partition
> >> at the start of the drive.  Setting up the partition with sysinstall
> >> is easy enough, but does anyone have any suggestions of how to
> >> diddle the bootloader to accept this configuration?
> > 
> > 
> > I doubt you can on FreeBSD.  The problem is that the OS would have
> > to mount both / and /boot before it could do anything, and FreeBSD
> > doesn't do that.  It assumes the partition that you are loading
> > from is '/', and uses that to find (for instance) /etc/fstab so
> > it can find out what the other partitions are.
> 
> I would have though that putting '/sbin/mount /boot' at the start of the
> /etc/rc would sort that out.  Surely the contents of /lib, /bin and
> /sbin are enough to get you that far?

The kernel has to be loaded *first*.