RE: Help autobooting FreeBSD 4.2

[Jochen Hoenicke]

On Jan 11, GB/DEV - Doug Poland wrote:
> > > As I was following the info page instructions for HD
> > > install, I wasn't sure if I should install into the
> > > MBR or the boot sector.  I created the HD with the
> > > "dangerously dedicated" option.
> >
> > I don't know BSD.  I just searched for "dangerously
> > dedicated"  and if I understand the description correctly,
> > grub doesn't support those disks since they have no MBR.
> >
> I believe that to be the case...

There seems to be a valid MBR though.  Grub detects the partitions
correctly:

> grub> root (hd0,a)
> 
>         Filesystem type is ffs, partition type 0xa5


> grub> geometry

Sorry, I meant "geometry (hd0)".  But as you can access /boot/loader
everything seems to work:

> grub> kernel /boot/loader
> 
>         "...some FreeBSD stuff here..."
> 
> grub> boot
> 
> And away it goes...
> 
> Is this chainloading?

No, but if this works, there is no reason not to do it with chainloading.

Chainloading would mean, that you install the native FreeBSD boot
loader into a partition and then do

rootnoverify (hd0,0)  # or whereever the other boot loader resides
chainloader +1
boot

I'm still not sure what a "dangerous dedicated" disk looks like and if
it is safe to install grub to MBR.  

If you want to boot automatically boot from a floppy, create a floppy
with some filesystem supported by grub (fat, minix, ext2, ffs), copy
stage1 and stage2 to directory /boot/grub on that floppy, create a
menu.lst in the same dir (see manual for the content of menu.lst),
start grub shell and enter "setup (fd0) (fd0)".

  Jochen