*BSD News Article 47830


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From: jwampler@cisco.com (Jim Wampler)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Disklabel can't write to sd0?
Date: 25 Jul 1995 19:26:34 GMT
Organization: cisco Systems
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Jordan K. Hubbard (jkh@violet.berkeley.edu) wrote:
: Most systems require fiddling to even get a drive other than
: sd0 and sd1 to be bootable - are you sure this is going to work?
: There are only two BIOS vectors AFAIK - 0x80 and 0x81.

Not sure it'll work.  Pretty sure it won't now...  I thought that
FreeBSD's boot programs were installed on sd0 and once they took
control of the system they no longer needed the BIOS and would have no
problem loading the kernel off of sd2 (although as I write this I
remember a discussion of booting that talked about switching between
protected mode and real mode to access the BIOS <sigh>).  I also
didn't know that the BIOS was limited to the sd0 and sd1.

: >happy with the geometry.  I've tried to boot the floppy and load the
: >kernel on sd0 by typing "sd(2,a)/kernel" at the floppy boot prompt.  I
: >get the message "Error: C:0 H:0 S:0" repeated rapidly and endlessly.

: Yeah, that's the BIOS alright.  It's saying "I can't read that",
: essentially, and is what's happening as the boot blocks try to use
: the BIOS to read the kernel off the 3rd drive.

: Have you tried booting this by way of OS/2's boot manager rather
: than a floppy?  It may have some clever way of reassigning this
: since OS/2 seems to boot off your 3rd drive (or does it?  If not then
: it's more than possible that this isn't a FreeBSD problem at all
: and that NO OS would boot off your 3rd disk).

: 					Jordan

No, OS/2's fdisk won't allow me to assign any partition on sd2
as bootable, even if the partition was create by OS/2's fdisk.

Guess I'm trying to do the impossible here.  I'll rearrange my
drives and try again.

Thanks for your feedback!!  (and all of the rest of your effort)

-jim