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Date:      Wed, 02 Dec 1998 16:55:50 -0800
From:      Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
To:        "John Saunders" <john.saunders@scitec.com.au>
Cc:        "FreeBSD current" <freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Booting 3.0-RELEASE in a non-standard setup 
Message-ID:  <199812030055.QAA01092@dingo.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 03 Dec 1998 11:39:10 %2B1100." <000d01be1e55$577177a0$6cb611cb@saruman.scitec.com.au> 

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> What happens...Using the FreeBSD boot manager I press F5 to
> switch to drive wd2, then F2 to boot the wd2s2 slice. However
> it seems that the boot block in wd2s2 decided to load the 2.2.8
> kernel from wd2s1 and I end up booting into 2.2.8 OK.

This is normal for the "old" bootblocks; they can only boot from the 
first FreeBSD slice on the disk.

> So I decide
> to try the new boot blocks, from 2.2.8 I mount the slice 2
> partitions and using the 2.2.8 disklabel I go...
> 	disklabel -B -b /mnt/boot/boot1 -s /mnt/boot/boot2 wd2s2
> ...which appears to update the right boot blocks. So now I use
> the F5 F1 proceedure and I get a different boot manager with a
> ? key for command list (BTW help doesn't work because the
> boot.help file got installed in the wrong place).

It actually uses a different help file format, and the help file isn't 
installed normally (because it wasn't ready at the time).

> However if I
> let the auto boot timeout go the 3.0-RELEASE kernel starts but
> dies with "unable to mount root wd1a" message.

That's correct; it's because the BIOS unit number is 0x81, but the disk 
is actually wd2.  There are a couple of ways you can sneak around this; 
one is to rebuild your kernel with:

controller      wdc0    at isa? port "IO_WD1" bio irq 14
disk            wd0     at wdc0 drive 0

controller      wdc1    at isa? port "IO_WD2" bio irq 15
disk            wd1     at wdc1 drive 0

the other is more complex, in that it involves you updating 
/boot/loader and playing with the $rootdev variable (it's broken in the 
version that you're using).

> Question...After all that, does anybody have a 2xFreeBSD on
> 1xDisk config working? If so then how? I could probably do
> some hackery with the partition table each time I want to boot
> 3.0 but it _should_ work without that.

The new loader makes this feasible, but it would certainly benefit from 
someone in your position poking at it a bit more to help iron out any 
remaining bugs.  If you're happy updating to a new /boot/loader, try 
'set rootdev=disk2s2a:' before 'boot kernel' and see if it does a 
better job.

-- 
\\  Sometimes you're ahead,       \\  Mike Smith
\\  sometimes you're behind.      \\  mike@smith.net.au
\\  The race is long, and in the  \\  msmith@freebsd.org
\\  end it's only with yourself.  \\  msmith@cdrom.com



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