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Date:      Fri, 16 Jun 1995 07:46:54 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@clark.net>
To:        paul@freebsd.org
Cc:        bde@zeta.org.au, jkh@freebsd.org, bugs@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: originally a newsgroup post, but news server here isn't working
Message-ID:  <Pine.SOL.3.91.950616074026.9381A-100000@clark.net>
In-Reply-To: <199506151408.PAA00290@lambda.demon.co.uk>

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I tried this and apparently it didn't work -- I aborted during the fsck 
after it had said it was writing the boot manager, bt when I rebooted it 
booted straight to dos again.  I ftp'd osbs (135) and booteasy -- found 
that os-bs (as found in dos-tools) won't support boot off of a second 
HD.  Boot easy worked fine though.  So it's now bootable, but that was 
after many attempts and several lost partitions (and not handled 
completely by sysinstall in order to get it to work.)

I guess the amin problem as I see it (from the perspective of the person 
watching the installation) is that killing off processes beacue of a lack 
of swap before there is swap can have bad side effects -- like incomplete 
tasks.  So I guess that may be the cause of all this.  I'm doing an 
installation on an 8 meg machine on Monday, I'll watch for any related 
problems and let yo know.

Thanks again..

Robert Watson   rwatson@sidwell.edu   http://www.sidwell.edu/~rwatson/
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps.  The goal of nature
is to build better mice.

On Thu, 15 Jun 1995, Paul Richards wrote:

> > a) no boot manager installed -- for soe reason that didn't happen during
> > sysinstall.
> > 
> > b) a bootable freebsd partition, wd(a,1) if anything knew to look there.
> > 
> > c) a FreeBSD boot loader on floppy that can be told to point to wd(a,1)
> > 
> > So here's my question ;).  Is there any post-installation way to get 
> > FreeBSD to put in the boot manager, or is that only available from the 
> > installation program, which has a nasty tendancy towards overwriting ones 
> > root partition entries if run with any decisions made (eg., to install 
> > the boot manager, you have to install root.flp, as far as I can see, and 
> > that zaps my /etc tree (also on wd(a,1)).
> 
> Yes, if you play around a bit.
> 
> 1) Run sysinstall :-)
> 
> 2) Go to the mbr (fdisk) partition editor, DON'T change any partition
>    sizes. Just mark your primary FreeBSD partition as bootable.
> 
> 3) Go to the disklabel editor, don't change anything other than
>    re-assigning the mount points.  That should mean that all the
>    partitions are marked read-only.
> 
> 4) Proceed with the installation, it will ask about installing a boot
>    manager -- choose one.
> 
> 5) It will then fsck your disks, you should be able to abort the
>    installation at this point (hit ctrl-C) before it does anything
>    else and all that will have happened is that the partition will
>    have been marked bootable and a boot manager will have been
>    installed.
> 
> This isn't a guarantee but I had similar problems and something along these
> lines worked for me.
> 



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