Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 20:28:30 +0200 From: Volker Paepcke <scratchy@vulcan.franken.de> To: jkh@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: imp@village.org, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Announcing 2.0.5-950622-SNAP Message-ID: <199506261828.UAA21470@vulcan.franken.de> In-Reply-To: <13565.804125202@whisker.internet-eireann.ie> (jkh@FreeBSD.ORG)
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> cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.ORG>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG > Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 01:06:42 +0100 > From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.ORG> > Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.ORG > > > I'm curious why dual boot is a "no and possibly never"? Windows NT > > can install itself in such a way as I can boot either 3.1 or 3.5. > > This is useful for testing to see if the new OS is sane enough (like > > running make on the programs that you are developing, eg) and gives > > you a way to back out quickly to a known good level. > > Just the amount of work involved is all. You can't have 2 FreeBSD > slices on a disk and boot from the second one as the boot code is too > stupid to understand that you might want to boot from something other > than the first one it finds. If you can think of a way of making > dual-boot work in all possible scenarios, then I'm certainly not > adverse.. > > Jordan > Hi! On my machine I have 3 different version (2.0-R, 0422-SNAP, 2.0.5R) on one disk and two more an another disk. All these systems are bootable with a little trick: I mark those systems which are not currently in use by setting the sysid with fdisk to 164 (dec). The one remaining on 165 is the one I'm booting from. Because this is a little complicated procedure I've saved the bootblocks including the booteasy booter in every constellation to the disk and swap these in and out at will with dd before a reboot. A probably better solution would be to let booteasy announce partitions with sysid 164 as FreeBSD partitions too. After choosing the boot partition the sysids on all FreeBSD partitions will be set to 164 except for the selected partition from which I want to boot. With the new diskslice code I will be able to access all the other partitions of the inactive systems. Is it possible to make the appropriate changes to the booteasy code? bye, volker BTW, the sysinstall procedure is VERY, VERY nice, although I'd like some more "hacker" functions like labeling the disks step by step and the possibility to recover a previously saved system (e.g. with dump) from tape. To do this I only need to label the disk, run newfs and get a /bin/sh to run restore manually to load the data from tape. I won't need a fixit floppy anymore if I could do all this with one great boot floppy :-)
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