Booting from alternate disk in sparc64

[Doug White]

On Tue, 2 Dec 2003, Garance A Drosihn wrote:

> Well, I started to write up one observation, and in the process
> found out that the situation was a bit different than what I
> thought.
>
> I now have two drives in my Ultra-10, and wanted to boot off
> the second drive.  I got to the open-firmware prompt.  Typing
> "boot disk0" boots up off the first disk, with the messages:

This explanation might help.

The OpenFirmware (or openprom) boot command just boots loader. Loader
actually loads the kernel. They can load from different locations, as you
found.  Normally in FreeBSD, you will not be changing things from OFW,
unless you want to boot off a CD.  If you are just booting a kernel from
another disk, you can just repoint loader using currdev.

Now, you *can* use OFW to start a different loader to make your life a
little easier, but its not required. The device that counts for finding
the kernel is currdev in loader(8) tho.

> So I tried typing 'boot disk1' at the open-firmware prompt.  It
> starts up about the same, except that it has 'disk at 1,0' where
> the above has 'disk at 0,0', and then it hangs before printing out
> the message 'Console: OpenFirmware console'.

I wonder if it was actually using the wrong console here, so it was
working, you just couldn't see it :)

> So I don't know why there's such a long pause there when I
> try "boot disk1", but it does seem to work...

Would be curious to investigate.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org