At 06:13 PM 7/18/2005, Ross Kendall Axe wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Luke Dean wrote:
>
> 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?
>
> 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
>
I created the partitions easily enough when installing the system. I
created a single slice and, inside that, partition d as my small /boot
partition and partition a as the root.
The problem I'm having is trying to actually boot the system. On boot,
the output (after the BIOS) looks like this:
error 1 lba 1190783
No /boot/loader
FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel
boot: <short delay...>
No /kernel
FreeBSD/i386 boot
Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel
boot:
The 'error 1' is presumably due to my dodgy BIOS, and 'No /boot/loader'
happens because it's looking on the wrong place for the stage 3 loader.
Undaunted, I type 'ad(0,d)/loader' to load the stage 3 loader. The
loader appears to load properly, apart from the fact that is displays
the message "can't load 'kernel". At this point, I type 'boot
kernel/kernel', which successfully loads the kernel and produces a
momentary 'twirling baton'. The keyboard then resets and the system hangs.
Attempt 2: Change all occurrences of /boot/ in all text files in the
/boot directory to /. Then, at the stage 3 loader prompt, type 'include
/loader.rc' instead of 'boot /kernel/kernel'. Again, the kernel appears
to be loaded successfully, and I get the standard boot menu with the
ASCII beastie. However, the boot hangs as before, with a keyboard reset.
Attempt 3: Try to load the kernel directly from stage 2 by typing
'ad(0.d)/kernel/kernel'. Fails with a register dump and the message
'BTX halted'.
It's starting to look to me as though the stage 2 bootloader and kernel
both want to be in the /boot directory on partition a. I'd love to be
proved wrong :-)
I think this is exactly the case.
According to the boot(8) man page, you can create a /boot.config that will
allow you to customize things. The only catch being that /boot.config has
to be on the a partition of the slice you are booting from. Normally the a
partition would be / and also contain /boot.
/ defaults to being 256MB. If you're trying to conserve space, it might be
easier to run through an install and see how big / really needs to be and
then do a second install and customize the size of / so that it only has
the space it really needs. (On one of my 5.4 systems / requires about 53MB)
You may have problems later on if you make the size of / too small.
-Glenn
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
