> > Thanks for pointing me to "faq14"! Honestly though, installing obsd is > getting > to be a convoluted exercise for me. Surely there has to be an easier and > more > bullet-proof and robust way to detect hardware at install time. It is kind > of > like needing to know how to make a watch before being able to tell the > time. LOL >
You need to convince some 40-50 years of global x86 history to change hard drive boot into something logical, instead of the many wrappers of faking stuff (like pxe and cdboot both loading a 1.44MB image into ram and then doing floppy-boot on it) it has now. You can have 10-20-30 disks attached to a pc using expanders and whatnot, and it still feels like it wasn't very long ago that PCs could actually boot from not first-drive-first-partition-first-sector, a concept that other arches boot environments have far less problems with since at least the 90s. Also, this is why openbsd has a long tradition of saying "dont multiboot until you have learned how your computer actually works". There is no way for an OS to make intelligent choices here, and some OSs just blindly overwrite whatever was there before since they can't be arsed to figure out how it was meant to work and how to add themselves into a menu or a list of possible targets. Since VMs and VPSs are a thing since forever, there is no real problem testing and installing into a machine with only one drive solely dedicated to whatever OS you want to test, and learn from there. You don't have to jump into the deep end of the pool on the first swimming lesson. You can, but you don't have to. -- May the most significant bit of your life be positive.
