From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Aug 2 12:10:49 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from pike.osd.bsdi.com (pike.osd.bsdi.com [204.216.28.222]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 932C737BA2F for ; Wed, 2 Aug 2000 12:10:45 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jhb@pike.osd.bsdi.com) Received: (from jhb@localhost) by pike.osd.bsdi.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id MAA75694; Wed, 2 Aug 2000 12:10:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jhb) From: John Baldwin Message-Id: <200008021910.MAA75694@pike.osd.bsdi.com> Subject: Re: FBSDBOOT.EXE is dead? In-Reply-To: <200008021424.AA776470734@mail.threespace.com> from "\"Technical Information\" Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 12:10:31 -0700 (PDT) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL68 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG \"Technical Information\" Nobody seems to want to talk about this, but I do, so listen up. > > The best information I can find says that FBSDBOOT.EXE doesn't work > any more, and since it seems like nobody with the skill to fix it really > cares, those of us who were really attached to that program may just be > ass out. I'm not sure that I really buy the whole explanation about > resetting jump vectors either since (a) I doubt that anyone expects to > return to DOS upon exiting FreeBSD and (b) LOADLIN.EXE seems to do the > job just fine for Linux. Eek, please wrap your lines. It is not a problem of returning to DOS after installation. When you start up DOS, it changes several of the interrupt vectors to point to yourself. However, when FreeBSD starts up, it overwrites some of the memory that DOS uses, thus if an interrupt comes in during an inopportune time (as they tend to do), it would end up executing garbage code and crashing the system. > Until I can muster up the skill to fix the problem (or nag somebody with > the skill into doing it before then), I need to know how to boot from > say, a bootable FreeBSD CD-ROM. If I've got a single IDE hard drive with > FreeBSD on the 3rd primary partition, how can I get that partition > started after booting from the Walnut Creek CD or a floppy? Boot the CD. When it gets to the 10 second countdown, hit 'space' to get a loader prompt. Type 'unload' to unload the kernel we loaded from the CD. Then type 'lsdev' to get a list of the disks on your system and the file systems they have. You will probably see a 'disk2s3a' or some such which will say 'FFS', and since it is partition 'a' is your root partition. So, then type 'set currdev=disk2s3a:' to change to the root directory as the working "directory" in the loader. Then type 'load /kernel' to load your kernel, and 'boot' to boot it. -- John Baldwin -- http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ PGP Key: http://www.cslab.vt.edu/~jobaldwi/pgpkey.asc "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message