Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 15:04:43 -0400 From: "Crist J. Clark" <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> To: Paul Moore <gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Booting FreeBSD from floppy (ie, without a bootloader on the hard disk) Message-ID: <20000520150442.B93357@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> In-Reply-To: <LPBBKGDEHNMONLBODEOHAEDACCAA.gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk>; from gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk on Sat, May 20, 2000 at 01:56:37PM %2B0100 References: <LPBBKGDEHNMONLBODEOHAEDACCAA.gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk>
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On Sat, May 20, 2000 at 01:56:37PM +0100, Paul Moore wrote: > Hi, > I'm a total newbie to FreeBSD - I've used Linux before, and I thought I'd > check out the "opposition" :-) > > As I'm just trying things out, I wanted to install FreeBSD onto my second > hard disk, leaving my existing setup on hard disk 1 totally untouched. > Specifically, I don't at this stage want to change the existing (NT) > bootloader on the main disk. > > I have installed FreeBSD on my second disk, and selected the option for no > bootloader. This worked fine, but I now seem to have no way of getting into > FreeBSD. I assume that I need to create a boot floppy which will start > FreeBSD off the hard disk. There was no option I could see in the install > process to do this (I used the "novice" install type), and I can find > nothing on the subject in the manual. > > Can anyone give me a step-by-step explanation of what I need to do? (As I > say, I'm not new to Unix, but I have no experience with FreeBSD). I have made boot floppies like this before. I'm just going to recite what I /think/ I did from memory. I might leave out a detail or two, but this is the gist of it. I think the easiest thing to do is start with the kern.flp boot floppy rather than making up a bootable floppy from scratch. # dd if=kern.flp of=/dev/rfd0 # mount /dev/fd0 /mnt # rm kernel.config kernel.gz. # cat > boot.config <<EOF -P 1:wd(1,a)/boot/loader Now, you did not say where this "second hard disk" is. The disk must be considered bootable by the BIOS for this to work. The system might be confused if the device is on the secondary master as opposed to the slave to the primary master (wd1 versus wd2 in the standard FreeBSD parlance... or ad1 and ad2 if you are using FreeBSD 4.0, you did not specify). You might need to add a, set root_disk_unit=<value> In the loader.conf file on the HDD (not the boot floppy) to straighten that out. > Further down the line, I'd like to add FreeBSD as an option to my NT > bootloader (I do not want to switch bootloaders, even if the FreeBSD one is > better...). To do this, I should only need a suitable MBR image which I can > store in a file on the NT boot drive, and I can then change NT's BOOT.INI to > add FreeBSD. For later reference, can anyone tell me how I get a FreeBSD > MBR? (On Linux, I install the Linux MBR on the Linux disk instead of the > boot disk, and then peel it off using dd - is there an option to do this > with FreeBSD?) I don't see why you could not just use dd(1) in the exact same way if that's how you know how to do it. However, I believe the file /boot/boot0 points to the MBR. See (picking relevent pages from `apropos boot` and some others), boot(8) boot0cfg(8) loader(8) loader.conf(5) disklabel(8) -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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