Booting MFS from Secondary Partition

[Fbsd1]

Martin McCormick wrote:
> I have hit one of these impenetrable walls in which nothing
> seems to work but I know it should. I have tried several
> versions of /boot.config to no avail. The idea is exactly the
> same principle as described in depenguinator which is software
> that lets one use grub in Linux to install FreeBSD on a working
> Linux system. The idea is to steal the swap partition, put mfsboot
> there, and then tell grub to boot from that partition rather than the
> normal active one.
> 
> 	The manual for boot.config makes me think I should be
> able to just put in the information describing the secondary
> partition and it should cause a boot from that one but:
> 
> /boot.config: 1:ad(0,b)/boot/loader -P
> 
> FreeBSD/i386 boot
> Default: 1:ad(0,b)/boot/loader
> boot:
> error 1 lba 0
> No /boot/loader
> 
> 	The mfsboot image works when started from the primary
> partition so I am stuck as to why boot.config is not starting
> from that secondary partition.
> The present boot.config is:
> 
> 1:ad(0,b)/boot/loader -P
> 
> 	If mfsbsd was starting, shouldn't it see its boot
> loader?
> 
> 	Is there a mfsbsd discussion list? Surely, somebody else
> has hit this brick wall, also.
> 
>

 From what I read in this freebsd.org article
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/remote-install/index.html

There is hard coded logic that is stopping you from doing what you want.
Looks like you are SOL.

Booting mfsBSD
Now that the mfsBSD image is ready, it must be uploaded to the remote 
system running a live rescue system or pre-installed Linux® 
distribution. The most suitable tool for this task is scp:

# scp disk.img root at 192.168.0.2:.
To boot mfsBSD image properly, it must be placed on the first (bootable) 
device of the given machine. This may be accomplished using this example 
providing that sda is the first bootable disk device:

# dd if=/root/disk.img of=/dev/sda bs=1m
If all went well, the image should now be in the MBR of the first device 
and the machine can be rebooted. Watch for the machine to boot up 
properly with the ping(8) tool. Once it has came back on-line, it should 
be possible to access it over ssh(1) as user root with the configured 
password.


The mfsbsd process has new maintainer,  Martin Matuska <mm at FreeBSD.org>
Email him for help.