On Thu, 2008-12-04 at 10:49 -0500, Jerry McAllister wrote: > On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 12:57:45PM +1000, Da Rock wrote: > > > > > On Wed, 2008-12-03 at 20:55 -0500, Robert Huff wrote: > > > Da Rock writes: > > > > > > > Excuse my nose in here- I just have a couple of questions. > > > > > > > > 1) It IS possible to boot from a dedicated disk? > > > > > > Yes. Can't remember the last time I used anything else. > > > > So you've never booted from a disk that has been partitioned as a file > > system? > > You are getting your terms scrambled here. > Partitioning has nothing directly to do with creating a file system. > You can build a filesystem (with newfs) on just about any piece > of disk whether it is the whole disk, a slice of the disk or a partition > of a slice. > > Making one of those divisions bootable is also pretty much an > independant operation too, though as far as I know, only whole > disks and slices can be made bootable but not partitions - the > fact that the partition contains the system files is not what > makes it bootable. Being bootable is dependant on the boot sector > which gets the control from either the BIOS or an MBR and then finds > the system partition (/), mounts it (Read Only) and finds system files > and starts those things running.
Yes, I would say I'm getting my terms mixed up- fortunately the actual reality is clear in my head (hard as that is to believe..). I have only one more question then: Why would you use "dangerously dedicated mode" at all? I can only see where it might be useful for files, no advantage to being a boot sector. It was some time ago that I read up on all this, but what I remembered was that BSD could use a dedicated disk- but only BSD could read and write from it and this is dangerous. Maybe what I was reading was regarding bootable and that was considered dangerous... At any rate I'm very clear now. Thanks for all the information guys- cheers _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
