Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 08:36:21 -0500 From: Charles Owens <owensc@enc.edu> To: Greg Schohn <root@jules.res.cmu.edu>, stable@FreeBSD.ORG, kingsled@enc.edu, Robert Nordier <rnordier@nordier.com> Subject: Re: disk problem at bootup... (me too!) Message-ID: <36B45C54.82BF98BE@enc.edu>
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Greg,
I believe I'm having the same problem that you are. I had my system
running 2.2.7 just fine. I did a clean reinstall of 3.0-RELEASE:
during the "fdisk" phase I said to my buddy, "I'm pretty sure that it
will _not_ work to make a bootable drive dangerously dedicated." Rather
than just go with what I has worked for years I decided to test my
assertion by attempting to dangerously dedicate the disk (duh :-). As
I'd expected I got an error during the commit phase. So I went back to
the fdisk screen, redid things normally, and completed the install.
When attempting the first boot I get a "missing operating system"
error. I can get into the system by booting from the install floppy and
typing "0:da(0,a)/boot/loader" at the first boot prompt.
So I'm thinking that my messing around with dangerously dedicated mode
must have screwed something up. Thus far I've done this to attempt to
fix it:
-- Booted the install disk. When to fdisk screen and did the normal
thing I'd do during and install: Use all disk (_not_ dangerously
dedicated), Set FBSD partition bootable. Then I hit 'W' to write it
out. Didn't help.
-- From the booted system (getting in via the on-floppy boot sector) I
typed both:
disklabel -B da0s1
and disklabel -B da0
I'm not quite sure if this was right, but it helped me as much as it
helped you.
In digging through the mail archives I've found some folks that seem to
have had this problem in the past. Several people suggested that the
installing DOS MBR via the DOS "fdisk /mbr" command would fix things.
Isn't this what the above disklabel commands are supposed to do? What
_is_ the correct way to do this from FreeBSD? Not that I'm _entirely_
opposed to doing it with the DOS utility. ;-) (I'm going to give this
a try Monday.)
Someone else pointed out that some motherboards have a BIOS setting by
which the motherboard will prevent the writing of the boot sector...
which can mess up FreeBSD install. Good point... I don't think that's
my problem here though.
I must admit I'm a bit unclear on how this is all arranged. Are there
multiple "boot sectors" that get processed during boot up? One "MBR"
for the whole disk and then another boot record that lives on each
bootable slice?
Thanks all,
---
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles N. Owens Email: owensc@enc.edu
http://www.enc.edu/~owensc
Network & Systems Administrator
Information Technology Services "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's
Eastern Nazarene College best friend. Inside of a dog it's
too dark to read." - Groucho Marx
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