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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!worldnet.att.net!cbgw2.lucent.com!news.bu.edu!engc!not-for-mail From: tom@bu.edu (Thomas P. Skinner) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Booting second drive Date: 29 Jan 1997 13:36:04 GMT Organization: Boston University Lines: 32 Message-ID: <5cnjo4$qf7@news.bu.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: engc.bu.edu X-Newsreader: TIN [UNIX 1.3 950824BETA PL0] Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:34674 I have successfully been able to boot a second drive by a rather complex process. I believe I have determined with reasonable certainty that a bug exists in sysinstall. This prevents booting from other than the primary drive if the system is initially installed on a second or other drive. Here's how I got things to work: 1. I disconnected my win95 master IDE drive and jumpered the slave as a master. Set CMOS appropriately. 2. Installed Freebsd. 3. Booted Freebsd 4. Added appropriate wd1 devices using MAKEDEV 5. Edited /etc/fstab to mount wd1 file systems rather than wd0 6. Halted system 7. Reconfigured the win95 drive as master and freebsd as slave. 8. Booted off of floppy with "wd(1,a)/kernel" successfully. If I install Freebsd on the second drive (using exactly the same options) I keep getting "Invalid format" errors. Scanning the source for boot reveals that this error is due to boot not finding the right magic number in the boot block. I have concluded that using sysinstall to install Freebsd to other than the first drive results in either no boot blocks being written by disklabel or something incorrect. From reading the source documentation I do not feel the MBR is at issue since it shouldn't be invoked when booting from floppy. It appears it is the next boot that causes problems, e.g. the boot in the Freebsd partition. I would be curious if anyone else having trouble booting had success with this method and if in fact there is a bug in sysinstall. Thomas P. Skinner