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From: us@microtronic.de (Ulf Schmidt)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: crash boot disks - I did it - now for some tuning...
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 96 16:49:56 GMT
Organization: MicroTronic GmbH
Lines: 42
Message-ID: <540mdt$hsl@snoopy.microtronic.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: slash.us-s.de
Keywords: boot disks, crash recovery
X-Newsreader: News Xpress 2.0 Beta #2

Hi there,
after receiving a lot of hints during my process of creating a set of bootable 
floppy disks I finally managed to get the following to work:

I have three disks:
1. the installation floppy from FreeBSD 2.1.5
2. a boot floppy plus kernel (kernel swap generic used)
3. a root filesystem floppy with the following programs:
 Usage: boot <prog> <args> ..., where <prog> is one of:
 sh - -sh expr ls mkdir rm sync test [ sysinstall rsh ln disklabel fdisk init
 mount newfs reboot halt fastboot fasthalt umount kbdcontrol ifconfig cpio 
 gzip  gunzip gzcat zcat bad144 boot plus tar which I couldn't get to work
 with crunchgen

This way I can create backups and restore a complete system on either a local 
tape device or (and this is, what I wanted to achieve) do it all over TCP/IP 
to a remote DAT-Tape/SCSI-Drive.

I'm willing to share any information about how to create this, but I'd like 
some help with fine tuning in return if possible:

a) I can't get the system to properly run my /etc/rc on the second floppy 
(root filesystem). The systems hangs no matter what I put into the file.
Even if it only reads:
#!/bin/sh
I have German keyboard layout on the disk and want it to start automatically.
Currently I deleted the file, so the system complains, but boots anyway.

b) I still have to partition and newfs the harddisk with the bootdisk from the 
FreeBSD installation (sysinstall). The sysinstall on my set of disks fails to 
create the new partitions with giving the error '/mnt/dev/rsd0xxx not found'. 
I ran MAKEDEV on the floppy, but maybe I'm missing something here.

c) I can backup and restore a complete system from this set of floppies. The 
backup process over the network is as fast as the network, but restoring a 270 
MB systems takes about 1 hour and 30 minutes. I have the same slowdown effect 
when installing a fresh FreeBSD via ftp on a local network.

Ok, maybe we'll get this thing to work 100% together.

With best regards,
Ulf Schmidt