RE: Help autobooting FreeBSD 4.2

[GB/DEV - Doug Poland]

Jochen Hoenicke said...
>
> 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,

Your instructions worked perfectly.  I'm now booting off the floppy
via a menu.  Thank you!

Now if I wanted to boot from the HD, here's what geometry reports...

Drive 0x80: C/H/S = 1078/243/63, The number of sectors = 16514064 /dev/rwd0

Partition num:0, [BSD sub-partitions immediately follow]

        BSD Partition num: 'a', Filesystem is ffs, partition type 0xa5
        BSD Partition num: 'b', Filesystem is unknown, partition type 0xa5
        BSD Partition num: 'e', Filesystem is ffs, partition type 0xa5
        BSD Partition num: 'f', Filesystem is ffs, partition type 0xa5

If this helps, here's a dump from disklabel...

host# disklabel -r /dev/ad0a
# /dev/ad0a:
type: ESDI
disk: ad0s1
label:
flags:
bytes/sector: 512
sectors/track: 63
tracks/cylinder: 243
sectors/cylinder: 15309
cylinders: 1077
sectors/unit: 16503039
rpm: 3600
interleave: 1
trackskew: 0
cylinderskew: 0
headswitch: 0           # milliseconds
track-to-track seek: 0  # milliseconds
drivedata: 0

8 partitions:
#        size  offset  fstype  [fsize bsize bps/cpg]
  a:   204800       0  4.2BSD    1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.    0 - 13*)
  b:   524288  307200    swap                       # (Cyl.   20*- 54*)
  c: 16503039       0  unused       0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 1077*)
  e:   102400  204800  4.2BSD    1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.   13*- 20*)
  f: 15671551  831488  4.2BSD    1024  8192    16   # (Cyl.   54*- 1077*)

Many thanks...
Doug