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Date:      Tue, 16 Jan 2001 00:05:09 -0800
From:      "David Schultz" <vvortex1@home.com>
To:        <cjclark@alum.mit.edu>
Cc:        <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>, <mwm@mired.org>
Subject:   Re: Fun with slices and partitions
Message-ID:  <002101c07f93$0bd98a20$0100a8c0@mshome.net>
References:  <002301c07f79$fd668a60$0100a8c0@mshome.net> <20010115232951.K97980@rfx-64-6-211-149.users.reflexco>

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Chist J. Clark wrote:
> > When I boot, boot2 can't find the root partition and dumps me at an
> > unhelpful prompt that isn't documented very well in the manual.
>
> man boot

s/manual/handbook/
I hadn't checked man boot. My fault on both counts.

> > My root
> > partition is currently ad1s1e, whereas it used to be ad1s3a. However,
ad1s3
> > does not exist anymore. Of course I can boot by typing 'ad(1,e)' at the
> > boot2 prompt, but it is necessary for this machine to be able to boot
> > without user intervention. Does anyone know how I can get boot2 to find
> > ad1s1e automatically or fix the disk labels so boot2 can find it where
it
> > is?
> >
> > So far, I've tried using disklabel to relabel partition e to a. Of
course
> > this fails because root is always mounted. Hmm... boot floppy? Please
let me
> > know if you have any suggestions, and thanks in advance.
>
> Yes, change your root partition to 'a.' And see boot0cfg(8).

boot0cfg doesn't seem to have any useful information on the problem at hand,
but thanks to you and Mr. Meyer for confirming that I do indeed need to
change the root partition to 'a'.

Mike Meyer wrote:
> Changing the ad1s1 labels is the solution. I managed this
> without a boot floppy, but I was on a system with two bootable FreeBSD
> systems. You might try doing this in single user mode with the root
> file system mounted r/o before going to a boot floppy.

I have had no luck with single user mode, and I do not have more than one
bootable copy of FreeBSD on my system anymore. There are several situations
in which a filesystem must be unmounted to make changes, and it would be
nice if a convenient way of unmounting root existed. Perhaps root's contents
could be dumped to a RAM disk and re-mounted on that virtual disk, thereby
allowing the copy on the hard drive to be updated. Then again, perhaps I
will have to settle for the inconvenient method.

Many thanks for your help, and please let me know if you have any other good
ideas.



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