Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 09:30:13 -0700 (PDT) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> To: bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans) Cc: bde@zeta.org.au, abial@korin.warman.org.pl, current@FreeBSD.ORG, sherwink@ix.netcom.com Subject: Re: Multiple FreeBSD Systems on a Single Disk Message-ID: <199707291630.JAA20288@GndRsh.aac.dev.com> In-Reply-To: <199707290502.PAA18490@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from Bruce Evans at "Jul 29, 97 03:02:45 pm"
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> >> The lack of support has nothing to do with the master boot loader. > >> The FreeBSD boot loader only supports booting from the first FreeBSD > >> slice (on any disk that can be accessed by the BIOS). > > > >And should be fixed (I've mentioned this before) to boot from the > >first ACTIVE (flag 0x80) FreeBSD slice. Should be a trival amount > > That would mainly break certain configurations. The active flag > should only be set for one partition, so you shouldn't have any active > FreeBSD partitions if you have an active DOS partition. Right, and if I have an active DOS partition the BIOS is going to boot the ACTIVE dos partition. It won't even load the BSD boot blocks if that is not the active partition. Any configuration that was broken by this change was broken such that the BIOS should have not even booted anything! The BIOS should have returned a ``No Active Partition'', or gone on to the next disk drive (yes, AMI bios'es as old as 1982 can boot from drive 0x81 if there are no active partitions on drive 0x80.) > This should be fixed by adding slice support to the boot loader's > name parser. Then you could bounce off the first FreeBSD to any other > slice by putting a boot loader on the first slice and configuring it > to boot from slice sN, e.g., "0:sd(0,s5,a)kernel" to boot the first > logical drive on an extended slice. Poppy cock, the active flag model should work and not require the addition of slice choosing support to the boot blocks. OSBS and other multiboot loaders will infact set the chosen partition to active, it is just the brain damaged FreeBSD boot code that ignores the active flag, and chooses the FIRST BSD parition it finds no matter what, which is _WRONG_. -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation, Inc. Reliable computers for FreeBSD
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