Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 11:58:13 +0200 (SAT) From: Robert Nordier <rnordier@nordier.com> To: jkh@zippy.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: john.saunders@scitec.com.au, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Booting 3.0-RELEASE in a non-standard setup Message-ID: <199812030958.LAA14987@ceia.nordier.com> In-Reply-To: <10151.912646644@zippy.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at "Dec 2, 98 04:57:24 pm"
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Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> > What I did...Booted from the CD and selected slice 2 (which
> > was empty) to install to. Using the disk label editor I created
>
> Which won't work. The FreeBSD boot loader, at least last I checked,
> is too stupid to know that there might be more than one FreeBSD slice
> on the disk and it just stops at the first one it finds. If you want
> to run different versions of FreeBSD on the same box, they at least
> need to reside on physically different drives.
This is correct for the old (/sys/i386/boot/biosboot) boot blocks.
However, the new (/sys/boot/i386/boot2) boot blocks specifically
provide for booting from any slice. You can have four FreeBSD
slices per disk, and pressing F4 will boot from slice 4, not from
slice 1.
The new boot blocks also allow you to override the slice using the
extended syntax
wd(0,2,a)
where "2" means slice 2, though this is presently undocumented.
The new boot blocks attempt to pass control to "/boot/loader"
by default; but this can be overridden by specifying "/kernel"
in /boot.config. They will also revert to loading "/kernel"
if "/boot/loader" isn't found.
--
Robert Nordier
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