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From: jhenders@wimsey.com (John Henders)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Booting FreeBSD using lilo, Possible?
Date: 7 Dec 1995 16:55:53 -0800
Organization: Wimsey Information Services
Lines: 45
Message-ID: <4a82ep$e31@vanbc.wimsey.com>
References: <49ve3e$njd@mksrv1.dseg.ti.com> <DJ78vt.E9w@citylink.dinoex.sub.org>
NNTP-Posting-Host: vanbc.wimsey.com
Keywords: FreeBSD, Linux, lilo
X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #3 (NOV)
peter@citylink.dinoex.sub.org (Peter Much) writes:
>YES!!! It's very good possible, I'm doing it only that way!
>Make an entry exactly like that for an ordinary MS-DOS partition,
>and let it point to the FreeBSD partition, that's all. (From the
>view of a boot manager, FreeBSD seems to behave like MS-DOS - just
>as it should be.) (sorry, can't copy the lilo-config from here,
>don't wanna reboot now.)
Well, after much futzing around, I managed to get a minimal FreeBSD
installation installed and booting from OS/2's boot manager. There are
some gotchas in there that can catch someone used to linux's flexible
booting that I'll outline.
First, on my setup, I have 2 ide drives used by dos, win95, and os/2,
and an adaptec 1542 with 2 scsi drives. This makes the adaptec bios
inaccessable to the boot bios, so a kernel has to be in memory to supply
the scsi driver to access the root drive. With linux this is no big
deal, because linux allows you several different ways to tell the kernel
which drive to mount as /. I used a tiny partition on the second ide
drive to hold the linux kernel. This partition is in the os/2 boot
manager menu. So, my first gotcha came when I repartitioned for FreeBSD.
After determining that I would have to have the root filesystem one of
the ide drives to get FreeBSD to boot, I repartitioned the drive that
had the linux partition on it and added a 40 meg partition for FreeBSD.
However, I missed the documentation that said that FreeBSD doesn't
understand logical partitions. I figured it out pretty quick when I saw
no logical partitions in the partition editor in the install.
So, I repartitioned again to give FreeBSD a primary partition, using
fdisk for linux, and added that to os/2's boot manager menu. Then I
installed, after partitioning the scsi drive for /usr and swap. This all
worked fine except for the boot block install program writeing boot
blocks both to the root of my main ide drive as well as the root of the
partition I put FreeBSD on. This meant another boot from the os/2 disks
to reinstall the os/2 boiot manager boot block.
Hope this helps someone else spend a little less time than I did
installing.
--
John Henders BOFH Wimsey Information Systems.
Vancouver's original internet service provider.
http://www.wimsey.com