Re: boot loaders and USB devices
Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:54:00 +0800 From: Aiza Subject: boot loaders and USB devices My PC does not have the BIOS option to boot from USB. I use an USB cabled external hard drive for taking backups. It has FreeBSD installed on it which I want to boot from so the motherboard cabled hard drive file systems are un-mounted during the dump. This USB drive will only be attached to do backups. I also have a USB stick containing a Freebsd install used to clone itself to the motherboard cabled hard drive. Since the BIOS will only boot from the motherboard cabled hard drive can I install a boot loader to gain boot access to my seldom connected USB devices? I reviewed the grub port but with no joy. What do you recommend? Robert Bonomi wrote: I think the standard FreeBSD loader should do this -- I haven't personally tested, however. You should get a menu from the boot loader asking which partition you want to boot from. with F5 (I think it is) being 'second disk". hit F5, and you get the 'which boot partition' menu again. Pick F1 for the first partition on the USB drive, and you should be in business. (obviously the '2nd disk' choice is going to show up _only_ if the boot loader detects the drive at power-up. I don't think it relies on the BIOS for this check, but has basic USB support built-in. Several _other_ possible approaches: if you can boot from CD, you could boot the 'live' cd, and then specify that the running filesystems are on the USB device Might be able to do the same from a carefully constructed floppy image. A -really- 'dirty tricks' alternative is to have an alternate /etc/fstab on the 'motherboard-cabled' HDD. One that specifies that '/' and everything else are on the usb-cabled drive. swap the fstab files, and boot 'as normal'. It will come up with everything running of the USB drive.` Do the backup, swap the fstab file back to the 'production' one, and reboot. voila! back to the normal drive. One more posswibility -- build a custom kernel with the 'root' device 'hard- wired' in as the USB drive. Interrupt the boot sequence, and specify this alternate kernel by name. I had though the boot0cfg was not USB aware so never tested it. But now I have tested and I was right. With the bootable USB stick flash drive plugged in I powered on the PC. I can see the PC bios post messages roll by and I see that the bios have added msg saying USB flash memory device and the pri-master ata device as available. The FreeBSD boot0cfg manager comes up with only f1 and f6 options. Pressing f5 has no effect. To me this means that the boot0cfg manager is not USB aware. Have to remember that boot0cfg was written way before there was such a thing as USB anythings. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
boot loaders and USB devices
My PC does not have the BIOS option to boot from USB. I use an USB cabled external hard drive for taking backups. It has FreeBSD installed on it which I want to boot from so the motherboard cabled hard drive file systems are un-mounted during the dump. This USB drive will only be attached to do backups. I also have a USB stick containing a Freebsd install used to clone itself to the motherboard cabled hard drive. Since the BIOS will only boot from the motherboard cabled hard drive can I install a boot loader to gain boot access to my seldom connected USB devices? I reviewed the grub port but with no joy. What do you recommend? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
Re: Boot Loaders
Ranish Partition Manager has become an actual boot loader as well. The latest "beta" version supports any size hard drive with up to something like 30 primary partitions. It, of course, has to store the additional partition information in a seperate "Ranish Partition Manager" partition. (Suggested size of the last complete cyl. or possibly last incomplete cyl. though complete cyl. is recommended. 8MB partition is what I usually end up with when I've used it.) You have the option then of installing a "default" (M$), "Text", or "Compact" boot loader. I think the "Compact" bm is mostly the same as the Text one, but I can't really remember all the details. I never used Ranish for a boot loader. Here's a link to a site describing how to set up a multi-boot using (an older version of) Ranish: http://www.trombettworks.com/multi-boot.htm Sincerely, John D. McDonnell --- John D. McDonnell Goroth Computing [EMAIL PROTECTED] ( freebsd ) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ( normal ) ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Boot Loaders
From reading the handbook (well, skimming it for referances anyway) and reading various posts on the mailing list, I believe I already know the answer, but just want to clarify it. FreeBSD doesn't need a specialized loader like Linux does. (i.e. Linux requires Lilo or now GRUB) And if you really wanted to (though I don't know why you would) you can use XP's "boot loader" to load FreeBSD. If I'm correct, then I'd also be able to use something like XOSL, ( [ www.xosl.org ] though it seems to no longer be updated at all as far as I can tell. Neither there or at sourceforge. [ xosl.sourceforge.net ] ) Ranish Partition Manager, [ www.ranish.com/part/ ] or any other boot loader available without haveing to do anything specific to boot FreeBSD (other than tell it the correct partition to boot from of course). If there are any other steps I'd have to take, please let me know. Sincerely, John McDonnell --- John D. McDonnell Goroth Computing [EMAIL PROTECTED] ( freebsd ) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ( normal ) ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: Boot Loaders
On Mon, 11 Aug 2003 14:38:56 -0400, John McDonnell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: From reading the handbook (well, skimming it for referances anyway) and reading various posts on the mailing list, I believe I already know the answer, but just want to clarify it. FreeBSD doesn't need a specialized loader like Linux does. (i.e. Linux requires Lilo or now GRUB) And if you really wanted to (though I don't know why you would) you can use XP's "boot loader" to load FreeBSD. If I'm correct, then I'd also be able to use something like XOSL, ( [ www.xosl.org ] though it seems to no longer be updated at all as far as I can tell. Neither there or at sourceforge. [ xosl.sourceforge.net ] ) Ranish Partition Manager, [ www.ranish.com/part/ ] or any other boot loader available without haveing to do anything specific to boot FreeBSD (other than tell it the correct partition to boot from of course). If there are any other steps I'd have to take, please let me know. Sincerely, John McDonnell I was under the impression that Ranish PM was only a partition manager (available as part of XOSL as well as standalone?) rather than a bootloader. For managing and imaging partitions, have a look at BootItNG http://www.terabyteunlimited.com>, free for 30 day trial and IMO easier to use than Ranish. For a bootloader, you can certainly use XOSL; you may want to have a look at GAG http://gag.sourceforge.net/>, or you can install Grub from ports - /usr/ports/sysutils/grub. Jud ___ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
Re: Boot Loaders
On Fri, 13 Dec 2002 04:30:56 +, Philip M. Gollucci <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Anyone here hand any experience with this? http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=Acronis+OS+Selector+8.0 Acronis OS Selector I wonder if you still need multiple disk drives. As far as I know the physical geomoetry of hard drives is altered to give you 4 fdisk sections if winblows is on it anywhere instead of 16. Linux takes 2. I would like to install all of the following if possible. Win95,Win98,Win2k Pro,Win2k Server,WinXP Redhat 6.3, 7.3, 8.0 FreeBSD 2.2.8, 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x (eventually) NetBSD-current OpenBSD-current Darwin-current FreeDOS I haven't tried Acronis. I have tried and am currently using another shareware product that does the same thing, is less than 1mb, and whose 30- day free trial is *not* feature-limited, called BootItNG ( http://www.terabyteunlimited.com ). BING will let you put an unlimited number of "primary" partitions on a disk. The reason I'm using BootItNG rather than Grub, which is freeware and a FreeBSD port, is because I have two of my boot sectors (W2K and FBSD 4-STABLE) on a RAID-0 array, which Grub doesn't quite grok yet AFAIK. I have never used the freeware boot loader XOSL, but have heard some nice things about it - some teenager was on TechTV the other month showing off the 30-odd OSs on his machine that he boots with XOSL. If you do try Acronis and/or XOSL, particularly if you also try bootloaders I'm familiar with, such as Grub and BootItNG, I'd be interested to know what your experiences were. -- Jud To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Boot Loaders
Anyone here hand any experience with this? http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=Acronis+OS+Selector+8.0 Acronis OS Selector I wonder if you still need multiple disk drives. As far as I know the physical geomoetry of hard drives is altered to give you 4 fdisk sections if winblows is on it anywhere instead of 16. Linux takes 2. I would like to install all of the following if possible. Win95,Win98,Win2k Pro,Win2k Server,WinXP Redhat 6.3, 7.3, 8.0 FreeBSD 2.2.8, 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x (eventually) NetBSD-current OpenBSD-current Darwin-current FreeDOS To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
