Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2000 11:58:44 +0900 From: "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com> To: John Reynolds~ <jreynold@sedona.ch.intel.com> Cc: freebsd-qa@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: question regarding root_disk_unit ... Message-ID: <38ACB564.3BE691D8@newsguy.com> References: <14508.13850.725857.718236@hip186.ch.intel.com>
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John Reynolds~ wrote: > > I remembered seeing messages like this flying in current-digest and 10 minutes > of reading the "help" stuff within the boot loader led me to figure out to say > "set root_disk_unit=0" at the boot prompt and put that variable in my > /boot/loader.conf for future use. No problem. My question is, is > root_disk_unit set for somebody in /boot/loader.conf during an install if > there is a chance of things being confused (i.e. IDE and scsi disks in a > machine such as mine)? I think I remember somebody saying that they were > putting that code into either sysinstall or something so that machines with > this disk configuration (or wierder ones) would happily boot after exiting > sysinstall. My install was flawless simply because I yanked the scsi disks out > of the machine before proceeding. Comments? We cannot reliably set root_disk_unit because we have no reliable way of correlating what the kernel sees to what the BIOS sees. In other words, it requires human intervention. The solution we (well, Mike) are aiming at is completely doing away with the _need_ for this. In fact, afaik, 4.0 doesn't need it. Hey, Mike, if 4.0 doesn't need it, can we deprecate it? > Also, a non-related-to-freebsd question (but I know somebody will have the > answer), the root_disk_unit=0 thing fixed me up for booting FreeBSD off my > scsi disk, but when I tried to boot Ebola '98 with the F1 option (also located > on da0, da0s1) it just "sat there" ... I assume this is confusion on its part > because there is a new disk in the system and Ebola '98 is too stupid to do > the Right Thing(tm)? Anybody experienced this behavior with a dual-boot system > after adding an IDE disk to what was an an all-scsi disk system? I dunno if Ebola 98 is capable of booting off anything but the primary partition of the first disk. -- Daniel C. Sobral (8-DCS) dcs@newsguy.com dcs@freebsd.org "If you consider our help impolite, you should see the manager." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-qa" in the body of the message
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