Installing on large disks

[Willem Jan Withagen]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Darryl Okahata" <darrylo at soco.agilent.com>
> > But MBR is where things like booteasy and grub also live??
> > So that functionality is lost. Or is boot0 called by booteasy/grub?
> 
>      I believe boot0 *IS* booteasy.  If you have booteasy installed, you
> have boot0 installed in the MBR (they are the same thing, I believe).
> In all probability, if you have booteasy installed, you only need to run
> "boot0cfg -o packet ad0" to set the bit in the MBR that tells
> boot0/booteasy to use packet mode when accessing the disk.  Once you've
> done that, you should be able to boot from the FreeBSD partitions
> installed beyond the 8GB limit.

I thought I tried that without much effect. But then it was late and I
could have made an error somewhere. But that was the commando I used.

This system has an extra 40Gb disk in it. I'll runs some test on that as 
I now have a config that does do what I need it to do. although the 
amd64-root slice is far away from all the other amd64 slices:

Order on the disk:

ad0s1a    / i386
ad0s1d    / amd64 both are below the 1Gb mark
ad0s1b    swap
ad0s1e    /var i386
ad0s1f    /tmp i386
ad0s1g    /usr i386
ad0s1h    /home1 
ad0s2a    /var amd64
ad0s2d    /tmp amd64
ad0s2e    /usr amd64
ad0s2f    /home2
ad0s3     win 2K primary partion above 100Gb mark
ad0s4     win XP64 in extended partition

Which is more or less also the order of installation
Then I booted the i386 CD again, but the FBSD boot manager there.
As expected it does not want my trick of /-amd64 as ad0s1d.
But it does boot win2k which gives me the Win bootselector for
2K of XP64.

So I installed GRUB as bootmanager. Which does allow me to boot
ad0s1d for amd64. And it does the Win stuff as well.

> > And it is not very clear to me that this would allow me to boot
> > win 2k and/or win 64XP.
> 
>      You do realize that both of these can blow away the MBR and replace
> it with Microsoft software?  You might want to use Windows to load
> FreeBSD, instead:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NT-BOOTLOADER
> 
> (However, I don't know if this will work with more than one bootable
> FreeBSD installation on the same drive.)

It also requires on the do some hassle with extracting the MBR's with the 
correct active flags. Which I fumble for shure, keepingme even longer from the
street. :)

But for now I'm a happy camper.
--WjW