Mark Gooderum writes:
>> I immediately ran into this quandary, which must be a FAQ but I searched the
>> port-i386 Gopher archives in vain:
>> 
>> If you have an IDE drive that DOS uses for C: and a SCSI drive, how do you
>> boot NetBSD?
> 
> On i386, the boot partition for NetBSD (and any other OS really) *must* be on
> a BIOS-addressable drive.

The Seagate is on an Adaptec 1542CF.  That Adaptec has its own BIOS on-board,
yes?

How do I tell if it's "BIOS-addressable"?  I could boot NetBSD off of it with
no trouble before when the IDE wasn't connected, so I assume that it is.

> If it's not on the first, you can chain multiple drives with "bteasy"; if
> there are more BIOS addressable drives, "bteasy" will present a menu with the
> next drive, then that drive will boot off the active partition, or present
> another menu if it's installed on that drive.
> 
> If the SCSI drive isn't off of a controller with BIOS support, then you're
> out of luck.  You have to have a partition with at least the boot blocks and
> kernel.  You can even keep the rootfs on the non-BIOS drive with a minor
> kernel hack to get it to force mounting the root fs from a particular place.

It looks to me (from looking at bteasy/readme) that it's much like OS-BS only
it can handle the 2nd drive.  Yes?  If so, it looks like just the ticket.

> You can get bteasy from many places; I keep a copy here at
> ftp://ftp.good.com//pub/NetBSD/bteasy.tar.

Thanks for the pointer!

Andrew Gillham writes:

> Just a couple of days ago someone posted about their "boot.com" that they
> wrote.  It was a port of the NetBSD bootcode to DOS.  It allows you to boot
> NetBSD from DOS (i.e., kernel on DOS disk), or just load the bootcode from
> DOS.   It is pretty slick, as you can just say:
>
> C:\> boot hd(1,a)/netbsd
> 
> This *should* boot your sd0 disk.

While slick, this is something I don't want to do.  I want the functionality
of my previous OS-BS setup, i.e. a menu to boot DOS/Windows or NetBSD, and
after an unchosen timeout, to default boot to something, in this case NetBSD.

> Anyway, that is all I can think of.  I heard rumors of a version of OS-BS
> that could boot 2nd drives, but I've never seen one.

This I would like to hear about, that's for sure ...

But I'm hopeful that BTEASY will be the ticket.

Thanks all,

	- Greg