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Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 15:02:45 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199707290502.PAA18490@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: bde@zeta.org.au, rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com
Subject: Re: Multiple FreeBSD Systems on a Single Disk
Cc: abial@korin.warman.org.pl, current@FreeBSD.ORG, sherwink@ix.netcom.com
Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
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>> The lack of support has nothing to do with the master boot loader.
>> The FreeBSD boot loader only supports booting from the first FreeBSD
>> slice (on any disk that can be accessed by the BIOS).
>
>And should be fixed (I've mentioned this before) to boot from the
>first ACTIVE (flag 0x80) FreeBSD slice.  Should be a trival amount

That would mainly break certain configurations.  The active flag
should only be set for one partition, so you shouldn't have any active
FreeBSD partitions if you have an active DOS partition.

This should be fixed by adding slice support to the boot loader's
name parser.  Then you could bounce off the first FreeBSD to any other
slice by putting a boot loader on the first slice and configuring it
to boot from slice sN, e.g., "0:sd(0,s5,a)kernel" to boot the first
logical drive on an extended slice.

Bruce