*BSD News Article 7413


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From: eoahmad@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg (Othman Ahmad)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: OS/2 boot manager and BSD386
Message-ID: <1992Nov4.102230.726@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg>
Date: 4 Nov 92 10:22:30 GMT
References: <Bx6Ert.EG8@iat.holonet.net>
Organization: Nanyang Technological University - Singapore
Lines: 38
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]

Richard Levenberg (richardl@iat.holonet.net) wrote:
: support over the phone and 2) a bsd partition for development.  i am
: trying to use the OS/2 boot manager (only because it is the only one
Why don't you try os-bs by Thomas Wolfram. It is available in 386bsd archive.

: of which I know and that I have) (maybe I have others and am unaware)
: each time i have the bsd install in free space and try to boot it from
: boot manager the system reboots itself.

If your boot manager is larger than 512 bytes, you will fail to boot
386bsd. 386bsd always uses the next 13 sectors for itself(?). I'm still
studying the bootblock using a disassembler.

: 
: one thing that i noticed right before i gave up for the day was that
: the bsd had to be installed before you could make the portion of free
: space that it would (in the future) install itself a part of the boot
: manager menu and then the OS/2 boot manager would report the old free
: space as more room on the disk making the disk larger than it actually
: was.

The best way is to install dos first before anything else. Install 386bsd
in other partitions apart from the lowest ones. the installation package
supplied with 386bsd written by lynne can get the boot block for 386bsd from
the partition a which can be located anywhere.
	However the subsequent loads, which is done by this boot block does
not know where partition a is.
	The best solution is to modify this boot block to not just look for
subsequent sectors, but from other partitions indicated by the disklabel.
	However I do not know where exactly this disklabel is?
Dos partition table though is well documented and I can look it up.


--
Othman bin Ahmad, School of EEE,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 2263.
Internet Email: eoahmad@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg
Bitnet Email: eoahmad@ntuvax.bitnet