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Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 11:20:17 -0400
From: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com>
To: Robert Clark <ROBERTC@PII.COM>
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: I did bad things to my disk -Reply
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Robert Clark:
 |Have you tried juggling the partition table entries? I've fixed oddball problems this way before.

Yes, I ended up going that route.  Rather than digging into the boot code,
I did what was suggested and just stuck to one root partition per disk.

What I'd like to do is have two slices on the same disk, one running 2.2
and one running 3.0-current, and which slice I boot off of determines which
root is booted of (i.e. boot wd1s2, root=wd1s2a; boot wd1s3, root=wd1s3a).

No such luck.  For now I'll just stick with 2.2.

Thanks for the reply.

Randall


 |
 |>>> Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com> 05/14/97 06:58am >>>
 |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.