*BSD News Article 79431


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: sd2/2 FreeBSD installation problem
Date: 28 Sep 1996 17:44:16 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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References: <51pdak$s1@ns1.win.net> <3244C4A3.ABD322C@freebsd.org>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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"Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> You cannot boot from the 3rd drive, only one of the first two.

That's no longer The Only Truth.  Modern SCSI hostadapters (and the
AHA-2842 likely belongs to this group) support BIOS mapping for more
than two drives, thus these drives can be used as boot devices as
well.  For the Adaptec's, this is usually configurable by their
SCSIselect[tm] utility.

_However_, their ability to select another drive than ID 0 as a boot
drive _should not_ be used.  This is meant to be a silly-DOS method
for booting off another drive than 0, but due to DOS' (and other
system's) constraints, they do it AFAIK by reassigning BIOS ID 0x80 to
the new boot device.  This conflicts with FreeBSD's expectation, so
you end up with a mismatch between BIOS and FreeBSD devices (BIOS
drive 0x80 == ``C:'' != FreeBSD sd0).

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)