/boot on a separate partition

[Luke Dean]

On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, Ross Kendall Axe wrote:
> I am currently trying to get to grips with FreeBSD and am trying it out
> on an old Pentium machine.  However, the machine's BIOS can't seem to
> read past 504MB, so I want to place the /boot directory in a small 25MB
> partition at the start of the drive.  Setting up the partition with
> sysinstall is easy enough, but does anyone have any suggestions of how
> to diddle the bootloader to accept this configuration?
>
> I don't particularly want to go for the standard 'small / partition and
> separate partitions for /usr, /var, /home...' since I only have a 1GB
> drive to play with and judging the partition sizes down the nearest KB
> would be... tricky.  I have performed this procedure before (many, many
> times) on Linux using both LILO and GRUB, but I can't seem to get my
> head around the FreeBSD bootloader.

All I would expect you have to do is use FDISK to make two partitions, 
remembering to mark the first one as bootable.  Then use disklabel to 
create your slices.  Make a /boot slice on the first partition, then make 
a / slice and a swap slice on the second partition.
That should be all that's required for what you're trying to do.
A little over a year ago, I had to split up a drive to solve the same 
problem you're having, but I went the "small /" route instead, so you 
might be running into a problem I didn't have.

Luke Dean