How to boot FreeBSD from a slave IDE disk

[Ian Moore]

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 11:21, RW wrote:
> On Friday 26 November 2004 04:26, rain cip wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I hope I can get some help from this list to figure out how to boot
> > FreeBSD from a slave drive.  My PC has two disks.  The sysinstall sees
> > both: ad0 and ad3.  My hardware configuration is such:
> >
> > ad0 -- primary IDE, master  (all for Win2k)
> > ad3 -- secondary IDE, slave (all for FreeBSD 5.3)
> >
> > No more device on the primary IDE while a CD drive acts as the master on
> > the secondary IDE.
>
> It's not in general a very good idea to mix a CD drive and a hard drive on
> the same ide channel since they operate at the speed of the slower device.

So, assuming you do have a cdrom drive on the secondary controller, you could 
move your ad3 drive to the primary IDE controller & boot from the Live CDrom 
to edit /etc/fstab to point to ad1 instead of ad3.
That way you can run both windows & FBSD without compromising disk speed!

> I've never actually used the FreeBSD Boot manager, so I can't really
> comment on that. What you might do is install a standard MBR on ad3 and set
> your bios to boot that device. Once you have FreeBSD running, you can
> install GRUB from ports/packages, and put that on ad0. Alternately if you
> have some kind of Linux live cd, you might install lilo from that.
>
Or as Joshua suggested, use GAG - it's the easiest bootmanager to install & 
configure that I've ever seen.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian

GPG Key: http://homepages.picknowl.com.au/imoore/imoore.asc
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