On Feb 1, 2018 7:59 AM, Stuart Henderson <s...@spacehopper.org> wrote: > > On 2018-02-01, ti...@openmailbox.org <ti...@openmailbox.org> wrote: > > Hi, so, this question sprung from the previous email however it's a big > > one and so deserves to be addressed separately: > > > > If a machine's BIOS does not support booting from a particular boot > > medium where OpenBSD is installed, e.g. my BIOS does maybe not > > supporting booting from PCIe NVME SSD:s, but it does support booting > > from USB memory sticks. > > > > For such situations, how can I create an OpenBSD USB stick boot disk, > > that continues the OpenBSD boot process for me but from the PCIe NVME > > SSD-stored crypto softraid? > > > > This could be done either by > > > > * The OpenBSD kernel being stored on the USB stick, loading from it, > > and then using the PCIe NVME SSD as both root disk, swap disk, and > > dump disk, or, > > I think this should be possible with a custom kernel to set the > devices. Updates will be annoying and it will be tough to get KARL > to work nicely. > > > * The OpenBSD boot loader which is stored on the USB memory stick, > > would load the OpenBSD kernel from the PCIe NVME SSD. > > The boot loader uses BIOS IO functions, if those can't talk to the > NVME it's not going to work. > > > This should be a fundamental and trivial usecase to OpenBSD, however, > > last time I tried (then with adding a "boot" command to boot.conf per > > http://man.openbsd.org/boot.conf ), I think it not worked out of the > > box. > > It might not be very appealing but afaict the only trivial way to do > this is to place root on the USB stick or some other device, and other > filesystems on NVME. > >
My root partition recently died. I did a full install on a USB stick. After booting from the stick I would then mount the other partitions from the hard drive. It was really annoying.
