Date: Sat, 16 Jun 2001 16:28:36 -0700 From: "Philip J. Koenig" <pjklist@ekahuna.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Disks, FreeBSD and syntactical inconsistencies Message-ID: <3B2B8934.9227.56BDB5@localhost>
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Just a note from a sometimes-frustrated person new to FreeBSD. Once one gets used to thinking in terms of disks in BSD's way (ie /dev/da1s1a), it's confusing when you run into boot problems to find: The boot0 or boot2 loader (never could quite make sure which this is - the handbook says it is boot2, but yet it's configured using "boot0cfg"?) presents you with a cryptic screen that shows the following (and no hints to help you - won't even boot the default without typing commands if you get stuck here): >> FreeBSD/i386 BOOT Default: 0:da(1,a) /boot/loader Which as it turns out is essentially a different way of representing the above, with the addition of the first "0" meaning BIOS as opposed to FreeBSD numbered drive. But yet the the loader and its configuration file, /boot/loader.conf or its default file /boot/defaults/loader.conf show the active disk in the following syntax: rootdev="disk2s1a" Which also apparently means the same thing, but who knows why it now thinks disk "1" is now disk "2". Furthermore, the loader refers to filesystems as "FFS", whereas other places in FreeBSD (ie mount) refer to them as "UFS". Granted you can't talk about a disk relative to /dev before /dev even exists, but it seems to me there could be some work on unifying some of this stuff. None of it is unsurmountable, but to someone new to FreeBSD (albeit with 15 yrs experience with various other OS's) it just seems unnecessarily confusing. If there's anything I didn't get right here, please feel free to clarify. Thanks, Phil -- Philip J. Koenig pjklist@ekahuna.com Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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