Re: Installing two versions in parallel

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> What's the best way (on PeCee hardware with MBR BIOS boot) to install two ve$

I haven't tried it on RAIDframe, but there was a work (amd64) machine
on which I set up mbr_bootsel booting with four options: FreeDOS,
NetBSD 5.2, NetBSD 8.0, and NetBSD 9.1.  It was just a matter of
pointing the MBR partitions at the pieces of the disk where I had the
four OSes installed, then telling fdisk to install mbr_bootsel.  Then,
on boot, it presented me with a small menu with a timeout; on timeout,
it picked the active MBR partition (so I could switch the default with
fdisk's -a option, for unattended boots).  The NetBSD partitions
involved were all set up with the same disklabel and used kernels
configured with root on the appropriate partitions.

Is that "best"?  I don't know.  It was a fairly good fit to that
particular use case's desires.  But, as I say, it wasn't a RAIDframe
setup; I don't know how it would have had to have changed for RF.  As I
recall RAIDframe, there isn't a good way to do autoconfigured root from
anything other than partitions marked (in their RF overhead data) as
autoconfigured root.  You might be able to make the different installs
use different partition tables, so that each one sees only its own RF
partitions at boot?

I do note you said that it's the boot device that is RF level 1,
whereas the previous paragraph is talking about the root.  But if
you're booting from level 1 RAID, I would guess you presumably want
root to be a RF set too.

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