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Date:      Mon, 19 Dec 1994 09:10:22 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Aled Morris <aledm@relay-europe.ps.net>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   MBR woes
Message-ID:  <Pine.3.89.9412190835.B7922-0100000@relay-europe.ps.net>

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I've been having a tough time installing 2.0R on an Olivetti 486 machine 
with 16Mb RAM and a Quantum 122Mb IDE drive.  AMI bios if that's relevant.

The problem seems to be the MBR that fdisk lays down.  I can install DOS 
no problem, it boots fine, but if I install FreeBSD (using the whole 
disk) the machine won't boot.  The BIOS boot messages come up OK (memory 
test, config stuff) then as soon as the machine goes to the hard disk it 
says "Read Error".

The way I worked round it was to put down a 1Mb DOS partition (after 
fdisk/mbr of course) then install FreeBSD on the rest of the disk.  Then 
I boot DOS and fdisk/mbr to write a valid MBR, then use DOS fdisk to mark 
the non-DOS partition active.

I think I can use a combination of DOS fdisk/mbr and FreeBSD fdisk to
create a FreeBSD only hard disk, but I'll need a shell to do it from - the
graphical sysinstall is pretty but it doesn't seem to let you run fdisk
with arbitrary parameters :-(

Aled
--
aledm@relay-europe.ps.net  |  tel +44 973 207987
Perot Systems Europe Ltd.  |  fax +44 181 476 2419




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