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Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 09:58:49 -0400
From: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com>
To: Nadav Eiron <nadav@barcode.co.il>
Cc: Dan Harty <kane@accesscomm.net>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: I did bad things to my disk
References: <336DE3C8.26E7@accesscomm.net> <Pine.BSF.3.91.970505180007.29976A-100000@gatekeeper.barcode.co.il>
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Nadav Eiron:
 |On Mon, 5 May 1997, Dan Harty wrote:
 |> IE, would sd1a change to sd1b ?
 |
 |No! Your situation is much worse!
 |
 |The FreeBSD boot code *always* expects the root filesystem to be on 
 |partition 'a' of the *first* BSD slice on the disk. Now, what used to be 
 |the first BSD slice on your disk now became the second (because there's a 
 |new BSD slice in front of it), so the boot code cannot find the root 
 |partition. Having two FreeBSD slices on the same disk is a mess. Avoid it 
 |at all costs. If it cannot be avoided, you should probably make a new 

Its sad that FreeBSD doesn't support this (I've posted about it before).
If I tell my boot manager to boot FreeBSD's off slice 3, and my boot
manager loads slice 3's boot record and gives it control, its just flat
dumb for FreeBSD to go out and "re-divine" which slice contains the FS I
want to be root.  It's the one in the slice I booted off of, dog'gone it!

Why doesn't FreeBSD just write the root partition for a slice (e.g. wd1s3a)
in the slice boot record?  We could even keep the hack [ws]d1a alias around
-- just redefine it to mean the "active" root partition rather than "first"
root partition.

Randall Hopper