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Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 18:51:05 +0200 (IST)
From: Nadav Eiron <nadav@barcode.co.il>
To: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com>
cc: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu>, questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Help With Partition Naming & Setup.
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On Tue, 21 Jan 1997, Randall Hopper wrote:

>  |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?  

Again, I've never tried this, and I don't use OS-BS, but the rule of 
thumb that I've heard around these lists is: One FreeBSD root partition 
*per disk*.

> 
> 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 don't know...

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