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Date:      Mon, 31 Jul 1995 16:10:44 +0100 (BST)
From:      Paul Richards <paul@netcraft.co.uk>
To:        robin@rucus.ru.ac.za (Robin Lunn)
Cc:        joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, roberto@blaise.ibp.fr, freebsd-bugs@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Suggestion.
Message-ID:  <199507311510.QAA25660@server.netcraft.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <199507311400.QAA15399@rucus.ru.ac.za> from "Robin Lunn" at Jul 31, 95 04:00:52 pm

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In reply to Robin Lunn who said
> 
> We did try that.  I dont know if its just that our AMI BIOS was being a sod,
> but we did undefine "Hard Disk 1".  The SCSI said not to define anything for
> it and so "Hard Disk 2" was not defined either.  The SCSI did then show up
> as "C:" instead of "D:" but the boot prompt did not show and the machine
> just hung.  We scrounged through the Adaptec host config program that one
> can get before boot and the only likely option was to enable booting under
> certain circumstances (it was about 2 screens from the initial screen, the
> context escapes me and I dont feel like rebooting to check it ;) but sadly

Have you got a bootblock on the scsi disk?

> that didnt help either.  Perhaps you could make another boot block that
> would boot off the scsi while the boot block sits on the IDE should the
> installer have SCSI and IDE and wish to boot from the SCSI.  (If this is
> possible with the current boot blocks ignore me.  I tend not to fiddle with
> boot blocks regularly)

I've had a setup work where I had a bootblock on the IDE that booted
FreeBSD off the SCSI disk by default and I also had a bootblock on the
SCSI disk so that most of  the time I could disable the IDE controller
and it would boot directly off the SCSI. I only enabled the controller
when I needed to access the IDE disks which I generally used for
installation testing.

It's all possible but maybe not quite plug-n-play. If you have a
backup of the scsi a brute force method would be to disable the
IDE controller and install from scratch onto the SCSI disk, sysinstall
will write a working set of bootblocks onto the SCSI disk then.
Make sure you can boot properly off the scsi without the IDE
controller enabled. Then enable the IDE controller and put a decent
boot manager on it that allows you to select which disk to boot
from. If you don't want to re-install from scratch you can try
putting new bootblocks onto the SCSI using disklabel. I'm not going
to give instructions on how to do that, if you don't understand
how to do it you're probably better off not trying since you could
trash the disk anyway if you get it wrong.

-- 
  Paul Richards, Bluebird Computer Systems. FreeBSD core team member. 
  Internet: paul@FreeBSD.org, http://www.freebsd.org/~paul
  Phone: 0370 462071 (Mobile), +44 1222 457651 (home)



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