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Ok, I'm /finally/ getting around to updating my crufty 3.1 box the
current release onto a brand-new mini-ITX system.

I currently have a minimal system installed to a 2Gb drive. It's an old
P-100, but I've never had a problem with /boot or /bsd not being found,
so I'm assuming that this is within the boot ROM's range. According to
the FAQ, I should be certainly reconsider this if I get a bigger drive
and a different boot ROM.

Of course, time marches on, and my collection of tiny hard drives has
dwindled to the point that I'm about to spring for a new Seagate
Barracuda or Momentus. This means getting a drive in the 20-40Gb range.
The entire drive will be used for OpenBSD.

So, to make sure that my boot ROM can find the boot partition, I should
fdisk at least two partitions, and make sure that I place the "a"
partition in the first slice which is guaranteed to be within the boot
ROM addressable range.

For example, I'm thinking of making the first slice 540Mb, and the rest
of the drive in the second slice. I'll then partition the first slice
into two, mounting / and /tmp onto it, and maybe even the swap. The
second slice will be partitioned for /usr /var &etc.

That is, the first slice will contain

partition a as / (100Mb)
partition b as swap (300Mb) [I've got 256Mb RAM]
partition d as /tmp (140)

Did I get what the FAQ was trying to tell me? Do I need another whack
with the OpenBSD clue-stick?

On 23/02/2005 11:53 AM, clvrmnky wrote:
> Ok, I'm /finally/ getting around to updating my crufty 3.1 box the
> current release onto a brand-new mini-ITX system.
>
> I currently have a minimal system installed to a 2Gb drive. It's an old
> P-100, but I've never had a problem with /boot or /bsd not being found,
> so I'm assuming that this is within the boot ROM's range. According to
> the FAQ, I should be certainly reconsider this if I get a bigger drive
> and a different boot ROM.
>

Never mind. I'm reasonably sure my new BIOS can boot anything under
120Gb, maybe higher. OBSD gets the whole disk, one slice.