Boot Device Question

Greg Barniskis nalists at scls.lib.wi.us
Fri Sep 2 13:05:07 PDT 2005


Timothy Radigan wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Just got done installing FreeBSD 5.4 on a Compaq DL380.  The issue I am
> having is that when the server reboots, it tries device ad(0,a) and fails.
> This is because the root partition is on ad(1,a).
> 
> How do I tell FreeBSD to use ad(1,a) instead of ad(0,a)?

Put a boot manager/menu on ad0 (where the BIOS can easily find it 
when looking for bootables) that will let you instruct the machine 
that you'd really rather boot from ad1.

The boot manager provided with FreeBSD should do, but you might also 
choose something else (GAG, GRUB, etc.). I usually take the FreeBSD 
boot mgr. for stable servers and GAG <http://gag.sourceforge.net/> 
for personal machines (where I tend to deinstall and reinstall 
different versions of things often). I've found GRUB to be awfully 
painful if the partition where its menu config is held gets broken 
or deinstalled.

See section 2.5.3 of the handbook
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-steps.html

Although that page describes the FreeBSD install procedure, you can 
use sysinstall to install just the boot manager without reinstalling 
the whole works.

You might also be able to trick your BIOS into booting from ad1 
directly, but (a) I've never tried that and (b) heard it's not 
really recommended because of unpredictable results.


-- 
Greg Barniskis, Computer Systems Integrator
South Central Library System (SCLS)
Library Interchange Network (LINK)
<gregb at scls.lib.wi.us>, (608) 266-6348


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