Date: 28 Oct 2002 11:52:18 -0500 From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.no-ip.com> To: swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen) Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, "demon" <hilbert@yandex.ru> Subject: Re: Install FreeBSD 4.4 into EXTENDED Partition Message-ID: <447kg2cxq5.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> In-Reply-To: <g37kg3v1rq.kg3@localhost.localdomain> References: <3DBACDE0.000002.21871@soapbox.yandex.ru> <00d801c27d15$4d22d9b0$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca> <20021026174208.GA5720@scottro11.homeunix.net> <44d6pxt562.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> <g37kg3v1rq.kg3@localhost.localdomain>
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swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen) writes: > Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.no-ip.com> writes: > > > Just to be clear; it *can* use "extended" partitions for disk space. > > It's just that the BIOS can't boot from them, and therefore the > > standard FreeBSD installer won't *install* into one. In theory, you > > can get around this, but not with the standard installer. > > Just to be clear: the BIOS can boot from them, as it does in many > people's Linux setups. My use of terminology was a little imprecise, but this statement is even more so. On no PC-class machine does the BIOS boot *anything* except the MBR. Linux systems (for example) that boot from extended partitions do so by using a boot manager that lives on the disk, somewhere beyond the 512-byte boot sector, but the BIOS knows nothing about those partitions. > (FreeBSD would either have to be able (like Linux) to use the same > secondary-partitioning scheme as IBM did or FreeBSD would have to be > able to shoehorn its slices in, supporting a tertiary-partitioning > scheme.) That's not really the problem. The boot manager has to know how to invoke the FreeBSD loader. With the root filesystem in its own extended partition, and the right set of boot blocks in that partition, you can boot FreeBSD from an extended partition, without changing any of FreeBSD's filesystem or slice support. [A number of people have done it; the only tricky part is that, as I mentioned in my earlier message, the FreeBSD installer can't do it for you.] Be well. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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