On Tue, 6 Nov 2007, Frans Haarman wrote:
> Just wondering.......

quoted text
>

> Has anyone ever thought of having 2 openbsd installations to boot from ?

> This way I could upgrade the installation on one slice/disk and boot from it!

"slice" is FreeBSD talk.  I assume you mean "disk partition", the thing

manipulated by fdisk.
>

quoted text
> Then if the kernel would crash/reboot the other slice would be used for booting.

>

> So at boot time the active slice is changed, after booting its changed back

> if there are no troubles!

>

>

> Perhaps this is an ugly work around to most, but it might save my life when a

> system refuses to boot the active slice...... Most of this can be

> prevented with

> remote consoles or ILO stuff I guess!   What do you think ? FUD ? ;)

OpenBSD's boot loader won't do this... but GRUB and LiLO will.  But

we do not need to turn to the penguin for this.
A "rescue floppy" or any recent OpenBSD installation cd will do it,

too.  You choose that third option from "upgrade, install, shell".

You get a shell, you then run fdisk to change the active partition, then

reboot.  Presto, change-oed.
If the "bad" partition just has a bad kernel, then you will have been

wise to have the bsd.rd kernel happily awaiting you, you can boot it

from the boot> prompt, run fdisk, etc etc.  If you are having "version

trouble" recall that bsd.rd need not be the latest and greatest to

be used for "rescue".
Dave

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