Seems to me we are not looking at the good direction.
I seem to understand that the problem is multi-booting, with OSes
possibly on multiple
physical devices.
It also seems that the starting point is a Lunixish advocating of having
a /boot partition
handling *all* parameters for all OSes, which is presomptuous or a
misplaced ego at least.
Each new installtion of an OS needs the controlling /boot/grub/menus.lst
to be mounted and
sudo edited (or worse, GRUB re-installed) before beeing able to boot
that new OS.
Very likely, GNU GRUB Legacy is used and installed in the /boot volume.
So why not use it?
With GRUB you can:
map drives (tell from which to really boot from)
hide/unhide partitions (i.e.: have two OpenBSD installs on the same drive)
make partitions active
chainload partitions
have many instances of grub, each in its own volume, handling all
specific OSes automaticly
write their specific kernel parametes
Key is to install the OSes to boot from their own partition and to never
re-write the MBR.
Only one OS should be allowed to write one mbr, be it NTLDR, GAG, GRUB.
With Lilo and GRUB, you may chose to install the boot record in the
(mis-named) partition
boot record (PBR) which is more like a volume boot record.
grub> setup (hd,x)
grub> install (hd,x)
Then, chainload.
Title whatever
root (hd,y)
chainloader +1
boot
And leave it to the OS specific boot pocesses to have it their specific
way with their
specific boot.conf or menu.lst or init.
More on GRUB, check this (Ubuntuish but extensive)
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/
Don't miss the MBR description
http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p6.htm which tells you
you only should rewrite only the first 446 bytes of the MBR, leaving the
rest (the four DOS/Intel
partition table) unchanged unless you know what you are doing.
Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 12:05:47AM -0500, Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 08:31:42PM -0800, Joseph Alten wrote:
So there isn't really an option like I was describing? I was going to just
create my / partition on my boot hard drive like you mentioned, but I
seemed so close when I ran "boot hd0a:/bsd -a" at the boot prompt that I
thought I was missing something in the documentation...
The boot prompt is the boot loader not the kernel. With your command,
you're telling the boot loader to load the kernel on hd0a:/ called bsd.
That's not the same as booting a kernel on one drive and using a
different drive for the root partition, which is what you asked for.
Yes, I know the -a flag tells the kernel to ask for root device. I just
don't see a way of telling the kernel up-front what root device to use.
In Linux parlance, this is having grub on /dev/hda but linux on
/dev/hdc1, which works without needing a separate /boot partition.
