How to boot FreeBSD from a slave IDE disk

[RW]

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.

> I used the entire space on ad3 for a FreeBSD 5.3 release installation while
> the ad0 contains my old Win 2k.  The problem now is that I can't boot
> FreeBSD at all even though I had selected "install boot manager" during the
> installation.  The PC went straight to Win2k every time I booted.  I tried
> to reboot from the distribution CDROM and used the FDISK utility to make
> sure that the FreeBSD slice is flagged as "A=" but it did nothing.  In the
> BIOS setting, I selected the slave drive, i.e. ad3, to be the first boot
> device, and the ad0 to be second.  Still, I couldn't get to FreeBSD.

I think that once you have installed a boot manager on the ad3 MBR, the active 
partition doesn't really mean anything.

> It appears to me that I did not have the boot manager installed on the ad0.
>  But when I tried to "install boot manager" onto the ad0, the fdisk gave me
> no hint where to write the MBR.  Basically what I did was:
>
> select "install boot manager"
> select "ad0"
> hit the "q" key
> select "install boot manager"
> select "ad3"
> hit the "q" key

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.