INSTALLBOOT(8) BSD System Manager's Manual (i386) INSTALLBOOT(8)
installboot - installs a bootstrap on an FFS disk or partition
installboot [-Anv] [-s sectors-per-track] [-h tracks-per-cyl] [-P
partition-type] boot bootxx disk
installboot is used to install a "first-stage" boot program into the boot
area of an FFS disk partition, and initialize the table of block numbers
the PBR program uses to load the second-stage boot program.
The options are as follows:
-A Tell bootxx to use automatic geometry detection.
-n Do not actually write anything on the disk.
-v Be verbose, printing out the LBA addresses that are to be
stored in bootxx along with lots of other information.
-s sectors-per-track
Used to specify the sectors-per-track value if the drive has
sector translation activated, and installboot is unable to
determine the translated geometry. If not specified, this de-
faults to d_nsectors from the disklabel. If not specified, this
defaults to the value retrieved from the BIOS at boot time,
available via sysctl(8). If not available, automatic geometry
detection is used. Valid are values from 1 to 63, inclusive.
-h tracks-per-cyl
Used to specify the tracks-per-cylinder value if the drive has
sector translation activated, and installboot is unable to
determine the translated geometry. If not specified, this de-
faults to d_ntracks from the disklabel. If not specified, this
defaults to the value retrieved from the BIOS at boot time,
available via sysctl(8). If not available, automatic geometry
detection is used. Valid are values from 1 to 256, inclusive.
-P partition-type
Use the partition-type value in decimal (on MirBSD also sede-
cimal or octal values are allowed, provided they are prefixed
with 0x or 0, respectively) as user-specified partition type to
search before the standard 0x27 and the fallback 0xA6, 0xA9 and
0xA5 types.
The arguments are:
boot The name of the second-stage boot program in the mounted
filesystem where the first-stage boot program is to be in-
stalled. This should be a full pathname.
bootxx The name of the prototype file for the first stage boot pro-
gram, usually /usr/mdec/bootxx.
disk The name of the disk containing the partition in which the
second-stage boot program resides and the first-stage boot pro-
gram is to be installed. This can either be specified in short
form (i.e., 'sd0' or 'wd0'), or as the explicit raw device
node, such as /dev/rsd0c or /dev/rwd0c.
Note that you must be in single-user mode or have your kernel
in insecure mode (see the sysctl(8) kern.securelevel variable
or /etc/rc.securelevel) to enable access to the raw partition
of a mounted disk.
The 'c' partition is always used to represent the "entire" disk
on i386.
The typical use is
# cp /usr/mdec/boot /boot
# /usr/mdec/installboot -v -n /boot /usr/mdec/bootxx wd0
And if the information supplied looks right, run the above without the -n
flag. If you are upgrading an old system, you may need to preface the
above steps with some more steps... and do the following:
boot the floppy.fs filesystem floppy
# fsck /dev/rsd0a
# mount /dev/sd0a /mnt
# cp /usr/mdec/boot /mnt/boot
# /usr/mdec/installboot -v /mnt/boot /usr/mdec/bootxx sd0
If you need to find the BIOS geometry of the disk for -s and -h you can
use the boot block command:
boot> machine diskinfo
Make a CD-ROM bootable for i386 (both as CD and as HD/CF/USB):
getextent_cd9660 -f cdrom10.iso boot | \
mksh /usr/mdec/bootxx.sh -S 2 | \
dd of=cdrom10.iso conv=notrunc
getextent_cd9660 -f cdrom10.iso boot | \
mksh /usr/mdec/bootxx.sh -B 11 | \
dd of=cdrom10.iso conv=notrunc bs=2048 \
seek=$(getextent_cd9660 -f cdrom10.iso -b '$BootImage$')
boot(8), disklabel(8), fdisk(8), init(8)
The -A option is supported by bootxx 0AA8 and up.
The disklabel d_type field must be set to a value of "4.2FFS".
You cannot run installboot for a drive/partition other than the one you
want the /boot to be loaded from.
MirBSD #10-current October 7, 2018 1