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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!charon.amdahl.com!pacbell.com!ames!agate!tfs.com!tfs.com!julian
From: julian@tfs.com (Julian Elischer)
Subject: Re: Booting 386BSD from second hard drive
Message-ID: <1992Oct2.221034.1397@tfs.com>
Organization: TRW Financial Systems
References: <1992Oct2.035826.863@spang.Camosun.BC.CA>
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 22:10:34 GMT
Lines: 43
In article <1992Oct2.035826.863@spang.Camosun.BC.CA> dbarker@spang.Camosun.BC.CA (Deryk Barker) writes:
>
>OK - here's the scenario. I want to run OS/2 and DOS on my new system,
>which will have a 170MB hard drive. When finances allow I want to buy
>a second hard drive and would like to install 386BSD on that. OS/2's
>boot manager will allow you to boot from a partition on drive #2, so
>the question is, will 386BSD do that? If not what is the minimum sized
>partition which I would need to leave on drive #1 for 386BSD to boot
>from?
>
>Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept., Camosun College, Victoria B.C.
>
With the new boot blocks the minimum sized partition needed
to boot from the second hard disk is 14 sectors
Of course there is not reason that it needs to be
a real partition.
All unix filesystesm leave at least that much room
free before the superblock, so what I do is to set up a
boot partition on the second disk,
then patch the figures in teh master boot block of the
first disk to point to the beginning of some unix partition
where I can conveniently dump a copy of then new bootblocks
which have been modified to default to drive 2.
I use os-bs to set the default partition on the first disk
to be the fake partition and off I go.
basically you can make the fake partition any set of 14
contiguous blocks that you know will not be overwritten.
(you could put them in a file on DOS if you could be sure that
it was not going to be deleted, and that it was contiguous).
julian
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