Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 14:37:17 +0000 From: Tim Bishop <tim-lists@bishnet.net> To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, T.D.Bishop@ukc.ac.uk Subject: Re: FreeBSD Boot Manager rendering disk un-bootable Message-ID: <20030218143717.GA15390@raq15.uk2net.com> In-Reply-To: <20030218131515.GA77992@HAL9000.homeunix.com> References: <20030218105616.GA569@raq15.uk2net.com> <20030218131515.GA77992@HAL9000.homeunix.com>
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On Tue, Feb 18, 2003 at 05:15:15AM -0800, David Schultz wrote: > Thus spake Tim Bishop <tim-lists@bishnet.net>: > > I'm testing vinum on FreeBSD 4.7 in preparation for building a > > server. However, I seem to have come across a problem with the Boot > > Manager. > > > > During installation I selected both disks to be entirely FreeBSD, and > > both to have the FreeBSD Boot Manager. This all worked fine. > > > > At boot time I got presented with two options; "FreeBSD" and "Drive > > 1". Selecting "FreeBSD" booted fine. Next time round I selected "Drive > > 1" and got presented with "FreeBSD" and "Drive 0". I selected "FreeBSD" > > and again it booted fine. All going well so far. > > > > Then I tried to boot up normally off the first drive and got told "Not > > found any [active partition] in HDD", followed by "DISK BOOT FAILURE, > > INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". At this point I figured maybe it > > was a disk failure, and this gave me an opportunity to test vinum. > > BootEasy is a very simple 512-byte boot manager. It expects to be > loaded from the BIOS boot device; there's no room to add sanity > checks in case someone installs it on something else. What you > apparently managed to do is use your boot loader on your first > disk to load BootEasy on your second disk. BootEasy then wrote > itself, including the partition table for the second disk, back to > the first disk. If you rewrite the partition table your disk > should be fine. On closer inspection what has happened is that when booting the second disk the partition on the first disk changes from "flag 80 (active)" to "flag 0". This fits with the message about about no active partitions being found. You say I "apparently managed" to do this, but I only selected the second of two options :-) Quite an easy mistake to make. > There's already an old PR open about this. I don't think there's > much that can be done, other than documenting the caveat better. Documenting it better might help. I don't actually have a need to do this, I just wondered what would happen if I did. Cheers, Tim. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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