From owner-freebsd-questions  Tue Jan 21 08:33:24 1997
Return-Path: <owner-questions>
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) id IAA28108
          for questions-outgoing; Tue, 21 Jan 1997 08:33:24 -0800 (PST)
Received: from whqvax.picker.com (whqvax.picker.com [144.54.1.1])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) with SMTP id IAA28095
          for <questions@freebsd.org>; Tue, 21 Jan 1997 08:33:21 -0800 (PST)
Received: from ct.picker.com by whqvax.picker.com with SMTP;
          Tue, 21 Jan 1997 11:32:24 -0500 (EST)
Received: from elmer.ct.picker.com ([144.54.57.34]) by ct.picker.com (4.1/SMI-4.1)
	id AA21467; Tue, 21 Jan 97 11:32:17 EST
Received: by elmer.ct.picker.com (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4)
	id LAA18655; Tue, 21 Jan 1997 11:30:33 -0500
Message-Id: <Mutt.19970121113033.rhh@elmer.ct.picker.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 11:30:33 -0500
From: rhh@ct.picker.com (Randall Hopper)
To: nadav@barcode.co.il (Nadav Eiron)
Cc: dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu (Doug White), questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Help With Partition Naming & Setup.
References: <Chameleon.853780175.List@journeyman> <32E1F00A.7061@barcode.co.il>
X-Mailer: Mutt 0.58
Mime-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <Chameleon.853780175.List@journeyman>; from Sean J. Schluntz on Jan 20, 1997 09:08:50 +0000
Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

 |Nadav Eiron <nadav@barcode.co.il> wrote:
 |> Sean J. Schluntz wrote:
 |> > I have one follow up question on this, how does the / get a label of
 |> > /dev/sd0a when the /usr and /var get labels of /dev/sd0s1f and
 |> > /dev/sd0s1e on my single dedicated SCSI disk.
 |> 
 |> For historical reasons (I guess). You can only boot from the *first* BSD
 |> slice on a disk, so the slice number of the root partition is irrelevant
 |> (the only root partition you can use is the one on the first BSD slice).
 |> This is from times when BSD didn't know about slices.

Ouch, I was planning to do this so I could run two versions of FreeBSD on
one disk instead of splitting them across two as I had done in the past,
and continue to use a third slice to share /home and other strategic
directories:

        slice 0  -  FAT
        slice 1  -  FreeBSD version x.xx (root partition)
        slice 2  -  FreeBSD version y.yy (root partition)
        slice 3  -  FreeBSD shared UFS   (/share)

So just to make sure that I'm not misinterpreting, even if I install my
boot manager (OS/BS 2.0B8) to allow booting off slice 1 or 2, when the BIOS
reads the boot record of either slice 1 or slice 2, FreeBSD's loader is
going to force-boot off the FreeBSD version installed in slice 1?  

Would it be hard to fix this?  It's too bad we don't support this setup.
It'd be particularly handy for developers.

I guess I'll just have to fall-back on putting each version on a separate
disk.

Randall Hopper