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Hi all,

I have PC with two OpenBSD 4.2 - bootable harddisks. Clearly I can
boot from either of them by setting a boot sequence in BIOS or by
typing "boot hdXa:/bsd" in the boot prompt (X = 0 or 1).

What I want is to specify a boot hdd without boot-time user
intervention. Thus, imagine I run OpenBSD on hd0, I want to specify
what hd1 shell be used as bootable on the next reboot.

installboot(8) offers what I need, but it can't be used for cross-
device installboots.

If possible, I'd like to solve this without any dedicated bootloaders
like grub. If you convince me that using bootloader is better
alternative, I would not mind much.

Note that run everything in VMware, so I am not afraid to screw-up
things.

All suggestions are welcome.

Andrei

On Apr 7, 7:44 pm, Andrei Korostelev <and...@korostelev.net> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have PC with two OpenBSD 4.2 - bootable harddisks. Clearly I can
> boot from either of them by setting a boot sequence in BIOS or by
> typing "boot hdXa:/bsd" in the boot prompt (X = 0 or 1).
>
> What I want is to specify a boot hdd without boot-time user
> intervention. Thus, imagine I run OpenBSD on hd0, I want to specify
> what hd1 shell be used as bootable on the next reboot.
>
> installboot(8) offers what I need, but it can't be used for cross-
> device installboots.
>
> If possible, I'd like to solve this without any dedicated bootloaders
> like grub. If you convince me that using bootloader is better
> alternative, I would not mind much.

I'd go for grub. I'm not very experienced with installboot(8), but I
think grub should handle this without problem. I have done this myself
with linux and FreeBSD once, and it worked great!

> Note that run everything in VMware, so I am not afraid to screw-up
> things.
>
> All suggestions are welcome.
>
> Andrei

Good luck!
Fredrik