Lars Noodin wrote: > I have the main system on a smaller, pre-existing drive set up with a > recent 4.4 i386 snapshot on a Dell Optiplex gx270. Booting is normal > until I add two SATA drives. > > OpenBSD sees the drive as wd0, but fdisk sees it as /dev/rwd0c, so the > effect is that when booting, this error message comes up:
your "cause" and effect is wrong. > > "Using drive 0, partition 3. > No O/S" > > What can be done, while keeping the new drives for non-system data only, > to boot from the original drive? > > Is there some trick that can be done with the MBR on the other drives to > point it to the original drive with /bsd on it? > > -Lars this is not an OpenBSD problem, your BIOS is booting from the wrong disk. This other disk has an MBR on it, but not an active partition (and in your case, probably nothing to boot from). The answer to your asked question is, "fight with your BIOS". My counter question is, "is it worth it? (Hint: no!)". It is not likely to be worth it to try to mix a "smaller" older IDE drive with a new big SATA drives. Get all done with it, you now have three failure points instead of two. Put whatever you want on the SATA drives, remove the IDE. Get your BIOS to boot from the disk you want it to. Then you can fight with the OpenBSD issues, like your boot drive might be wd2 instead of the wd0 you are expecting. Certainly can be dealt with, but a pain. In the case of a GX270, a BIOS update might be very very useful for you, as yes, they had SATA support, but not sure how perfect or flexible it was early on. Last time I did a lot of disks on a single box, I found it easiest to quit using the on-board SATA interface, put everything in PCI connected SATA cards, and pry the BIOS chip off all the boards other than the one I wanted to boot from. Then I moved that around until I found the slot ordering that gave me a port on the card with the boot ROM at wd0. Could I maintain a machine that booted from, say, wd3? Sure. Could I expect anyone else to? No. Again, not OpenBSD issues, the PC systems get "exciting" when you pack a lot of different kinds of BIOSs in one system. I've done this battle in Windows. I can assure you, OpenBSD is much easier... :) Nick.
