Re: Booting MFS from Secondary Partition
On Saturday 06 March 2010 15:02:20 Martin McCormick wrote: Fbsd1 writes: just dd the image to what ever drive you want That is the goal. The challenge is to launch a script that detects when the boot device has been unmounted as dd will not work on an active file system. Martin it may or may not work, but there's a sysctl for the geom subsystem which might do what you want. sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 This used to be used (for all i know still can be) to allow writing metadata for (eg) building a gmirror on a mounted disk - it's often referred to as the ``allow-footshooting'' flag. That might allow you to dd your image onto the mounted disk - i'd either try it with a handy spare system or wait for someone more expert than i to comment, though. Jonathan ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Booting MFS from Secondary Partition
Fbsd1 writes: just dd the image to what ever drive you want That is the goal. The challenge is to launch a script that detects when the boot device has been unmounted as dd will not work on an active file system. Memory disk images apparently survive until reboot so there is a possibility that one can get in the write between the umount of everything and complete shutdown. I am truly impressed with how robust FreeBSD is as it probably should be very hard to log in to a working system and remotely rebuild it. I did read one of many introductory articles about mfsbsd that tells you to just use scp to get the image over to the target system and then, as root, use dd to apply it to the boot device. That is not possible unless one first boots from some other medium. Martin McCormick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Booting MFS from Secondary Partition
Fbsd1 writes: There is hard coded logic that is stopping you from doing what you want. Looks like you are SOL. Me thinks you are absolutely correct. I was only hoping I was doing something wrong and a slight syntax change would make it work. Thank you and thanks to Maciej Milewski m...@dat.pl for his suggestion. I have one last trick up my sleve before giving up completely on this idea. Maybe I can hijack one of the rc.x scripts to cause it to spew a memory disk image of the mfsboot code on to the freshly-unmounted /dev/ad0 device during a reboot. Since the goal is to completely rebuild the system anyway, this would be the last gasp of the present system as it gets ready to reboot, hopefully with mfsbsd and all hard drives dismounted. Martin McCormick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Booting MFS from Secondary Partition
Martin McCormick wrote: Fbsd1 writes: There is hard coded logic that is stopping you from doing what you want. Looks like you are SOL. Me thinks you are absolutely correct. I was only hoping I was doing something wrong and a slight syntax change would make it work. Thank you and thanks to Maciej Milewski m...@dat.pl for his suggestion. I have one last trick up my sleve before giving up completely on this idea. Maybe I can hijack one of the rc.x scripts to cause it to spew a memory disk image of the mfsboot code on to the freshly-unmounted /dev/ad0 device during a reboot. Since the goal is to completely rebuild the system anyway, this would be the last gasp of the present system as it gets ready to reboot, hopefully with mfsbsd and all hard drives dismounted. Martin McCormick ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org just dd the image to what ever drive you want ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Booting MFS from Secondary Partition
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 r...@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 m...@freebsd.org Email him for help. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
