From owner-freebsd-questions Sat May 20 12: 4:55 2000 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 3500637B619; Sat, 20 May 2000 12:04:47 -0700 (PDT) (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 PAA94375; Sat, 20 May 2000 15:04:43 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from cjc) Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 15:04:43 -0400 From: "Crist J. Clark" To: Paul Moore Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Booting FreeBSD from floppy (ie, without a bootloader on the hard disk) Message-ID: <20000520150442.B93357@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Reply-To: cjclark@home.com References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: ; from gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk on Sat, May 20, 2000 at 01:56:37PM +0100 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sat, May 20, 2000 at 01:56:37PM +0100, Paul Moore wrote: > Hi, > I'm a total newbie to FreeBSD - I've used Linux before, and I thought I'd > check out the "opposition" :-) > > As I'm just trying things out, I wanted to install FreeBSD onto my second > hard disk, leaving my existing setup on hard disk 1 totally untouched. > Specifically, I don't at this stage want to change the existing (NT) > bootloader on the main disk. > > I have installed FreeBSD on my second disk, and selected the option for no > bootloader. This worked fine, but I now seem to have no way of getting into > FreeBSD. I assume that I need to create a boot floppy which will start > FreeBSD off the hard disk. There was no option I could see in the install > process to do this (I used the "novice" install type), and I can find > nothing on the subject in the manual. > > Can anyone give me a step-by-step explanation of what I need to do? (As I > say, I'm not new to Unix, but I have no experience with FreeBSD). I have made boot floppies like this before. I'm just going to recite what I /think/ I did from memory. I might leave out a detail or two, but this is the gist of it. I think the easiest thing to do is start with the kern.flp boot floppy rather than making up a bootable floppy from scratch. # dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/rfd0 # mount /dev/fd0 /mnt # rm kernel.config kernel.gz. # cat > boot.config < In the loader.conf file on the HDD (not the boot floppy) to straighten that out. > Further down the line, I'd like to add FreeBSD as an option to my NT > bootloader (I do not want to switch bootloaders, even if the FreeBSD one is > better...). To do this, I should only need a suitable MBR image which I can > store in a file on the NT boot drive, and I can then change NT's BOOT.INI to > add FreeBSD. For later reference, can anyone tell me how I get a FreeBSD > MBR? (On Linux, I install the Linux MBR on the Linux disk instead of the > boot disk, and then peel it off using dd - is there an option to do this > with FreeBSD?) I don't see why you could not just use dd(1) in the exact same way if that's how you know how to do it. However, I believe the file /boot/boot0 points to the MBR. See (picking relevent pages from `apropos boot` and some others), boot(8) boot0cfg(8) loader(8) loader.conf(5) disklabel(8) -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message