Re: specifying root / adding a hard disk

On Fri, 5 Jul 2024 at 12:28, Riccardo Mottola
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> my SS4 is tight on disk space. The internal Hard disk is SCSI Target 3,
> pretty standard!
>
> Now I want to attach an external hard disk I use on the IPC, I could use
> and add the swap partition.
>
> Actually i could even then try to install 9.4 on it externally and do
> some tests...
>
> External disk is set to Target 5, but probe-scsi sees it as target 0.
> Even if I change it to 4, it still things it is Target 0, maybe it is
> broken or not connected.
> Anyway, if I boot of disk (remember, 3) it works, but then internal disk
> gets sd1 and not sd0, so NetBSD is confused and tries to mount the other
> disk as root and dies.
>
> I need sd0 to stay sd0 :) Or to say somehow sd1 is boot root for this test.
>
> The only way would be to set (and have it recognized) an SCSI ID > 3 I
> suppose?

An alternative is to use the symbol 'ROOT.' instead of sd0 in /etc/fstab - eg:

ROOT.a  /       ffs     ro               1 1
ROOT.b  none    swap    sw,dp            0 0
ROOT.e  /var    ffs     rw,log,noatime   1 2
ptyfs   /dev/pts ptyfs  rw
kernfs  /kern   kernfs  rw,noauto
procfs  /proc   procfs  rw,noauto

That will allow fstab to Just Work no matter what the disk ends up as the root