> > But even knowing the correct name for my HDD - sd1 - I still can't get > anywhere > from the boot prompt. >
At the time of grub or obsd boot> prompts, the names of disks are not the same as inside the OS, by that time it is all driven by talking very generally towards the BIOS and the bios only has a perception of disk 1,2,3,4,5 and so on, not "wdX" for IDE or "sdX" for scsi-disks, which is why boot-loaders often use names that are deliberately not-the-same as the OS later will give them, so listing visible drives from any boot menu usually shows hd0, hd1 and so forth. Depending on the OS you later boot, and how it enumerates drives (ide first, then scsi, then usb?) the names and numbering of the drives is almost guaranteed to never be the same as during boot. Again, not obsd-specific but just a consequence of how x86 boot methods are, and the difference in what the bios knows about the drives and how the OS later picks up disks after scanning all buses. For instance, at the bottom of the boot(8) manpage [ https://man.ifconfig.se/amd64/boot.8 ] for amd64, the example shows doing some settings (not relevant here) and then booting from the second drive with the command: boot> boot hd1a:/bsd -c so there you can see how the boot is mentioning second drive as hd1, partition a, file /bsd When it boots, the kernel will either think that disk is named sd1 (if the two drives are scsi-like and this is the second) or sd0 (if the other disk was IDE and got the name wd0) so the fstab will not have "hd1a" anywhere in it. The OpenBSD FAQ has a whole chapter on handling disks, with examples and more info than I can convey here: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq14.html -- May the most significant bit of your life be positive.
