I've been looking at the problem of booting off a RAID 1 set without
the separate little boot partition with a kernel on it, and I seem to
be stuck.  Here's my current setup:

The outer partitioning on sd0 and sd1 are identical, thus:

Partition table:
0: sysid 169 (NetBSD)
    start 63, size 35524377 (17345 MB), flag 0x80
        beg: cylinder    0, head   1, sector  1
        end: cylinder 1022, head 254, sector 63

Disklabels on sd0 and sd1 are also identical:

 a:  35524313       127     4.2BSD      0     0     0   # (Cyl.    0*- 14405*)
 c:  35524377        63     unused      0     0         # (Cyl.    0*- 14405*)
 d:  35548320         0     unused      0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 14415*)
 e:  35524377        63       RAID                      # (Cyl.    0*- 14405*)

The RAID set is within the 'd' partition, labeled thus:

 a:    524288         0     4.2BSD   1024  8192    32   # (Cyl.    0 - 511)
 b:   2099200    524288       swap                      # (Cyl.  512 - 2561)
 c:  35522560         0     unused      0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 34689)
 d:  35524224         0     unused      0     0         # (Cyl.    0 - 34691*)
 e:   1048576   2623488     4.2BSD   1024  8192    32   # (Cyl. 2562 - 3585)
 f:  10485760   3672064     4.2BSD   2048 16384    64   # (Cyl. 3586 - 13825)
 g:   2097152  14157824     4.2BSD   1024  8192    32   # (Cyl. 13826 - 15873)
 h:  19267584  16254976     4.2BSD   2048 16384    64   # (Cyl. 15874 - 34689)

With this setup, I can access raid0a as sd0a, to install boot blocks.
However, the boot record for the partition gets installed at offset
127, which means the BIOS can't access it.  If I change the BIOS's
idea of where the NetBSD partition begins, by incrementing the start
of the 169 partition to sector 127, I lose access to the outer disk
labels, so that the inner (raid0) disk label is also seen as the outer
(sd0) disk label.  Poof goes access to the partitions making up the
RAID set.

It looks like a Catch 22 to me...

Please tell me I'm wrong!  ;-)

-tih
-- 
Puritanism -- the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.