FreeBSD slices and the Boot Manager

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 28 Jul 2013 08:18:39 -0600 (MDT), Warren Block wrote:
> On Sun, 28 Jul 2013, Polytropon wrote:
> > On Sat, 27 Jul 2013 19:39:30 +0200 (CEST), Conny Andersson wrote:
> 
> >> A very important question is if sysinstall's option "Install the FreeBSD
> >> Boot Manager" detects that I have a FreeBSD 8.3 and detect it as slice 2 on
> >> disk 1?
> >
> > I'm not sure I'm following you correctly. The sysinstall program
> > is considered obsolete, the new system installer is bsdinstall.
> 
> AFAIK, sysinstall is still used in FreeBSD 8.X, and bsdinstall does not 
> have a boot manager option anyway.

Sometimes I'm confusing them, because I usually don't use the
installer and usually use fdisk (if needed), bsdlabel and
newfs. :-)




> >> So it becomes a boot option when I am rebooting? (Maybe the slice
> >> may come up as ad6s2, because AHCI in FreeBSD 8.4 isn't enabled at the time
> >> of the install.)
> 
> Sorry, I don't understand this at all.  AHCI should not be involved with 
> identifying slices.

Maybe the required device driver is not part of the 8.x
GENERIC kernel? So for example a drive could come up either
as /dev/ada0 or as /dev/ad6, depending on how the recognition
order and PATA / SATA thing is handled by the system and
its BIOS. Labels will work independently from wheather
the device will be recognized as ATA disk (for example
/dev/ad6s1a being the root disk) or SATA disk (where
/dev/ada6s1 would be the root disk).





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...