In message <19980925154853.A5438@marvin.ece.utexas.edu>"Brian C. Grayson" write
s
>On Fri, Sep 25, 1998 at 11:25:04AM -0700, Bill Studenmund wrote:
>> On Fri, 25 Sep 1998, Todd Whitesel wrote:
>> 
>> > But I was wondering, just how easy is it to use a non-'a' partition as
>> > your root disk? Does the presence of a real 'a' partition confuse findroot
>> 
>  The original post mentioned this was for an i386 box.  Under
>i386, NetBSD usually uses its own bootblocks at some portion of the
>booting process (after the handoff from the BIOS or other boot
>manager like OS-BS), and prints that message about "Use hd1a to
>boot sd0a if wd0a is also installed" (or something like that).  At
>the prompt, you can type something like:
>
>wd(0,h)/netbsd

And it is relatively easy to dive down into /sys/arch/i386/stand/biosboot [?]
and tweak the boot code so that it automagically boots off of the 
non-'a' partition.  Just reinstall the boot blocks, and voila!
I do this all the time...

Kevin
kml@nas.nasa.gov