From owner-freebsd-questions  Tue Sep 16 22:41:06 1997
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Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 15:10:48 +0930
From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>
Cc: John Kelly <mouth@ibm.net>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Disk copying
References: <341e9e08.62967997@smtp-gw01.ny.us.ibm.net> <Pine.BSF.3.96.970916203941.4310I-100000@localhost>
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In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970916203941.4310I-100000@localhost>; from Doug White on Tue, Sep 16, 1997 at 08:43:10PM -0700
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On Tue, Sep 16, 1997 at 08:43:10PM -0700, Doug White wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Sep 1997, John Kelly wrote:
>
>> It says that
>>
>>> Remember, dedicated mode disks cannot be
>>> booted by the PC architecture.
>>
>> Not true here.
>
> I know and some others have commented about that, but my experience
> doesn't match. I may have messed up the format however.  At some point in
> time I'm going to buy a new disk and I'll test it w/ that when I get it
> (_when_ I get it :-) ).

It works.  I do it this way all the time.  All the BIOS needs to know
is how to find the first sector on the disk, and that's independent of
the BIOS.  It should always work, and it should be more reliable than
BIOS booting (in particular, though it doesn't make much sense here,
your root partition can end beyond the BIOS limit).

> Until then, I'll think about loosening up the warning a bit by
> throwing some YMMV's in there.

You might consider removing it until you have reasonable proof that
the problem was due to the way the disk is partitioned.

Greg