*BSD News Article 25824


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
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From: richv@hpingll.cup.hp.com (Rich Van Gaasbeck)
Subject: Possible to run from second IDE drive only?
Sender: news@cupnews0.cup.hp.com (News Admin)
Message-ID: <RICHV.94Jan10120323@hpingll.cup.hp.com>
Date: Mon, 10 Jan 1994 20:03:23 GMT
Nntp-Posting-Host: hpingll.cup.hp.com
Organization: Hewlett-Packard
Lines: 25

I'd like to run NetBSD from my second IDE drive only.  The first drive
is filled with a single msdos partition and since I don't have a tape
drive to back it up easily, I would rather not have BSD scribble on
it.  Will changing the config line to:

config netbsd root on wd1 swap on wd1

do the job or is there something hard coded somewhere that "knows"
that it should use wd0?  I seem to recall that it has the partition
letters for swap and root hardcoded.  Ok, I forgot /etc/checklist or
/etc/fstab to mount the filesystems from wd1.  Anywhere else?  How come
no-one specifies a dump device in any of the sample config files?

How about booting.  Presumably I should be able to make a boot floppy
(anyone know how to do this, other than cloning one of the install
floppies) with my wd1 kernel.  I would boot from the floppy, the boot
code on the floppy would read my kernel off the floppy (w/o mounting
it, right?) and when the kernel starts running it should mount wd1
partition A as root just as if the kernel had been booted off wd1,
correct?

I notice that none of the sample config files use wd1 as root.  Has
ANYONE ever tried this?

Richv