On Tue, 6 Nov 2007, Frans Haarman wrote:
> Just wondering.......
>
> Has anyone ever thought of having 2 openbsd installations to boot from ?
> This way I could upgrade the installation on one slice/disk and boot from it!
"slice" is FreeBSD talk. I assume you mean "disk partition", the thing
manipulated by fdisk.
>
> Then if the kernel would crash/reboot the other slice would be used for
> booting.
>
> So at boot time the active slice is changed, after booting its changed back
> if there are no troubles!
>
>
> Perhaps this is an ugly work around to most, but it might save my life when a
> system refuses to boot the active slice...... Most of this can be
> prevented with
> remote consoles or ILO stuff I guess! What do you think ? FUD ? ;)
OpenBSD's boot loader won't do this... but GRUB and LiLO will. But
we do not need to turn to the penguin for this.
A "rescue floppy" or any recent OpenBSD installation cd will do it,
too. You choose that third option from "upgrade, install, shell".
You get a shell, you then run fdisk to change the active partition, then
reboot. Presto, change-oed.
If the "bad" partition just has a bad kernel, then you will have been
wise to have the bsd.rd kernel happily awaiting you, you can boot it
from the boot> prompt, run fdisk, etc etc. If you are having "version
trouble" recall that bsd.rd need not be the latest and greatest to
be used for "rescue".
Dave
--
You don't have to like businessmen to like capitalism.
