Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 21:28:46 -0500 From: David Syphers <dsyphers@uchicago.edu> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD's boot manager Message-ID: <200204110228.g3B2Slsw006163@midway.uchicago.edu>
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I suppose my basic question is how do I use the FreeBSD boot manager? A few years ago I had a multi-boot system with Win95, WinNT, FreeBSD 3, and FreeBSD 4 (which was -current then). However, I used BootMagic. I have since entirely gotten rid of MS, played with RedHat for a while but could never get grub to boot to FreeBSD. I now run just FreeBSD -stable, but I wanted to install -current. I had about 4GB unused at the beginning of my disk, so I thought I'd put -current there. I installed -current and FreeBSD's boot manager. Rebooting, it gave me the options of F1 (FreeBSD) and F2 (FreeBSD) (is there any way of changing these names to something useful?). F1 (-current) boot fine, but F2 just beeped at me and did nothing. I tried using boot0cfg on the -current installation to change the default booting slice from 1 (-current) to 2 (-stable). What this accomplished was that I was no longer even given the option to boot to -current, and -stable still wouldn't boot. I then tried using sysinstall to delete the -current slice, set the -stable slice active, install a new boot manager or install a standard MBR. Nothing worked. What finally worked was creating a slice on /dev/ad0s1 of type 123, and installing a new boot manager. What is type 123? I have no idea. I just happened to remember that's what it was originally, which struck me as odd since nothing other than Linux and FreeBSD had ever been on the machine (apart from a factory-installed WinXP that was wiped off without ever being booted to). I suppose what really mattered was that I had _some_ format to that space, so that -stable would be ad0s2, rather than ad0s1. But why can't the boot manager find other bootable slices? I guess I'm just used to the lovely piece of software that is Partition/Boot Magic. However, I can't find any information on how to force the boot manager to recognize anything else either. The boot0cfg manpage doesn't seem to have anything, and _FreeBSD Unleashed_ limits itself to quoting this manpage. Everyone seems to have info on FreeBSD/Linux or FreeBSD/MS dual boots, but not FreeBSD/FreeBSD. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/multi-os/article.html says that boot easy should automatically recognize bootable partitions. However, this article seems to have been written 6 years ago. Have we regressed since then? :) Also, on my working system with only one OS, the boot manager gives me two options, F1 "unknown" and F2 "FreeBSD" (it's always done this, I guess because of that type 123 slice). F2 doesn't work, but hitting F1 boots into FreeBSD on ad0s2. This also appears pathological, but at least I can boot. Please help me figure out this mess :) -David -- Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand... Center for Cosmological Physics The University of Chicago To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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