Hello,
I am having trouble installing OpenBSD 4.0 on a USB thumb drive, which
represents itself as a removable drive.
The problem is, that the BIOS of my motherboard shows removable USB
drives as floppy drives (bios drive 0x00) at bootstrap, and when
installing OpenBSD, the kernel shows the same drive as hard drive sd0,
so it will install the hard-drive specific boot files, and the first
stage boot loader fails to load the second stage boot loader
(Loading...; ERR M).
So the USB stick must boot the second phase and load the kernel like
floppy (bios drive 0x00), but the kernel must use the same USB thumb
drive as sd0 when mounting the root.
I have been reading that cross-device booting is not possible, but can I
somehow use installboot/disklabel/whatever to put a floppy-alike boot
sector to the USB device, so the boot sector can find the second phase
boot loader (/boot/boot) and kernel (/bsd) on fd0, but make the kernel
use sd0 as root device?
Or should I just ditch the idea, or use a USB thumb drive that is
non-removable so my BIOS will show it as a hard drive? I know my memory
card reader shows itself as non-removable, so it is bios drive 0x81
(hd1), so I could try with it.
I do not know if this is normal BIOS behaviour, as I've never used
OpenBSD on machines which could boot over USB. Nor I don't know if this
is normal from the USB stick to say it is removable, or if other are
non-removable.
BTW, this is way harder than making my FireBox router boot from hd0 (8MB
flash device soldered on motherboard) and load the kernel from hd1 (real
hard drive) and use that as root, as they are just hard drives.
Thank you for any comments, I'll appreciate them.
- Jani
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Saunalahti Iso G - 50 Gigatavua nopeaa ja varmennettua verkkolevyd
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