Problems with booting & MBR

[Gary W. Swearingen]

vdm.fbsd at virgilio.it writes:

> # Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
> /dev/ad1s2b             none            swap    sw              0       0
> /dev/ad1s2a             /               ufs     rw              1       1
> /dev/ad0s1a             /usr/local      ufs     rw              0       0
> /dev/ad0s1d             /var            ufs     rw              0       0
> /dev/ad0s1e             /tmp            ufs     rw              0       0
> /dev/acd0               /cdrom          cd9660  ro,noauto       0       0
>
> Now, even though I read the booting procedure in the handbook and somewhere
> else in the internet, issuing the various "fdisk -b B", "disklabel -b ..",
> "boot0cfg ..", I was completely unable to modify the MBR and make this FreeBSD
> only computer boot directly into this OS.

If you're sticking to FreeBSD's boot0 MBR, you'll have to put one on
each disk.  I don't know if boot0 can remember "F5" as the default
choice for auto-booting or not.  But one way or another the first
disk's boot0 needs to use "F5" to start the second disk's MBR/boot0
which needs to use "F2" by hand or from boot0cfg config.

You could also use grub or lilo to do it too, but it's harder to set up.

> P.S. Is it possible that some problems can arise by the fact that I used
> an "a" slice (ad0s1a)for mounting /usr/local and freebsd starts from ad1s1a?

Only the "easy-to-fix" problems that you're having.