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Old 5th December 2014
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scottro scottro is offline
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Heh, I wouldn't even try. Now that I know what it does, I'll leave it alone. (Know what it does, in the sense that now that I know choosing to edit, if there is no OpenBSD partition, means dealing with the MBR).

Regardless, no harm done to anything that matters to me and I learned an easy way to do it. I thank all who have offered insight.
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Old 5th December 2014
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If the OS is expected to be ..... uniboot (), then MBRs are only needed on boot drives, because they're only used during boot by the BIOS. However, on MBR architectures, its often recommended to put an MBR on every drive anyway, just in case the drive gets attached to another OS. If there is no MBR, that other OS (or its admin) may scribble on the drive, believing the drive to be available for use. With an MBR in place, the OpenBSD partition should be recognized as reserved storage to other OSes.*

If the drive has an MBR, OpenBSD will use the location of the first MBR partition of type 0xa6 in order to locate the OpenBSD disklabel. If there is no OpenBSD partition or no OpenBSD disklabel in the partition, OpenBSD will create a virtual disklabel from recognized MBR partition types in order to be able to mount foreign file systems.

If the drive doesn't have an MBR, OpenBSD will look for an OpenBSD disklabel at the beginning of the disk. The specific sector is architecture dependent.

---

* MBR partition tables are limited to addressing the first 2TB of a drive with 512-byte sectors. See FAQ 14.8 for MBR management on larger drives.

Last edited by jggimi; 5th December 2014 at 03:20 AM. Reason: clarity
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Old 5th December 2014
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Well, I got carried away with my new discovery of how easy it would be, so put it on a spare partition on my UX31E Zenbook too. Unfortunately, though it sees the Atheros wireless, and mentions it in dmesg, I can't get it work. Googling indicates this is a known issue, but the old Zenbooks included a USB to ethernet dongle and that worked out of the box.

One thing that impressed me was that the synaptic driver worked out of the box on the Clevo. With FreeBSD, I did try installing it and going through the handbook's steps, but, at least last time I tried, several months ago, and probably with an earlier version, now that I think about it, I couldn't get synaptics to work.

(It didn't work out of the box on the Zenbook, but the mousepad did seem less overly sensitive than it usually does. I haven't done much in X with that one though.)
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Old 5th December 2014
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We may be able to help with the WiFi issue, but that is best managed via a separate thread.

Last edited by jggimi; 5th December 2014 at 04:44 AM. Reason: Typo
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Old 5th December 2014
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Agreed. Thanks for the reminder.
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Old 13th December 2014
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I think dual booting OpenBSD is likely difficult, because dual booting is fundamentally a Linux-ism. And I agree, with your assessment of "guilt".
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Old 13th December 2014
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Meh, it's easy as pie to boot OpenBSD with Linux. I really didn't find their documentation on it clear, so once I figured it out, I put up my own page, at http://srobb.net/openbsdmultiboot.html (Though I do say on the page that the user is assumed to have a bit of experience, I would think that anyone who knows what a primary partition is and has used Linux fdisk should have no trouble with it, which isn't putting the bar too high.)

I don't follow the OpenBSD community, and when I have, on occasion, viewed a mailing list thread, the comments didn't seem too vicious. Regardless of what the community is, they're still viable, so if it works for them, that's fine. If they became so insular that the community stagnated and died, then it would be a problem, but till then, whether or not they are the people that Mr Rogers knew they could be is between them and their own visions of themselves.

I sometimes don't know when it's the fault of documentation or myself, but I have received thanks for various pages that I've put up, so at least if it is me, I'm not the only one.
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Old 13th December 2014
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Quote:
Originally Posted by scottro View Post
Meh, it's easy as pie to boot OpenBSD with Linux. I really didn't find their documentation on it clear, so once I figured it out, I put up my own page, at http://srobb.net/openbsdmultiboot.html (Though I do say on the page that the user is assumed to have a bit of experience, I would think that anyone who knows what a primary partition is and has used Linux fdisk should have no trouble with it, which isn't putting the bar too high.)
Many thanks for the link to your page! My experience with dual booting OpenBSD is limited to using lilo on Slackware. I am not as comfortable using GRUB.
On another topic I really appreciate the fact that the admin team of this forum has not locked this thread. At this point in my OpenBSD adventure I do not have enough knowledge to contribute to OpenBSD directly. In the future I hope to be of some use to the community.
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Old 13th December 2014
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I would think Lilo would be even easier, but haven't used it in a long time. I wouldn't worry about those who say you're just along for the ride, and honestly, I suspect that even those who are just along for the ride, if they phrase questions and criticisms in a certain manner, can be considered helpful. Shucks, many of us when we're first taught to ride bicycles are just along for the ride with our older brothers.

In my opinion (which is that of someone not at all involved with OpenBSD) even a casual user can help. The more casual users, the more likely that someone knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who thinks, Gee, my friend's friend's friend uses OpenBSD so while I'm doing this, let me test if it works on OpenBSD as well. Or something--anyway, the point is that I wouldn't get put off by that statement.
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Old 13th December 2014
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rocket357 View Post
Don't like systemd? Good luck changing the Linux powers-that-be minds on it. Their corporate backers like systemd...and they most certainly aren't here to please the end user.
hehe yea I almost feel sorry for the Linux community due to that "systemd thing". Thank god that BSD exists!
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Old 13th December 2014
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Right, nice page and this is the entry in the faq

Quote:
9.2 - Dual booting Linux and OpenBSD (amd64/i386)

Multibooting is not trivial, and it requires an understanding of ALL the operating systems you wish to have coexist on the machine. The GRUB loader commonly used with Linux can boot OpenBSD as a generic operating system. From time to time, GRUB tries to natively handle OpenBSD booting -- using this feature is NOT recommended, as there is no coordination with OpenBSD development, and so this feature is often broken, and there's really no need for it. Just use OpenBSD's boot code, and what GRUB terms "Chain Loading" to invoke it.

A GRUB entry which could boot OpenBSD installed on the second MBR partition (partition "1" in OpenBSD's fdisk) might look like:

menuentry "OpenBSD" {
set root=(hd0,2)
chainloader +1
}

Your milage will vary.
Personally, after reading this thread and finding the faq, at this point in the game, I can't stop laughing.
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Old 13th December 2014
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Here's a link for dual booting freebsd and openbsd.

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/d...openbsd.39129/
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