Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 03:39:48 -0700 (PDT) From: OZ <oz16oz2@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: emergency: can't boot! please help Message-ID: <20030823103948.8418.qmail@web80604.mail.yahoo.com>
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Hi, I've got a massive problem and I need urgent help, please. Trying to set up a dual boot, and I've rendered my primary master (which has windows xp) un-bootable. On this page: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NT-BOOTLOADER in section 9.10... it says: --------------------------------- "If FreeBSD is installed on the same disk as the NT boot partition simply copy /boot/boot1 to C:\BOOTSECT.BSD However, if FreeBSD is installed on a different disk /boot/boot1 will not work, /boot/boot0 is needed. "Warning: DO NOT SIMPLY COPY /boot/boot0 INSTEAD OF /boot/boot1, YOU WILL OVERWRITE YOUR PARTITION TABLE AND RENDER YOUR COMPUTER UN-BOOTABLE! "/boot/boot0 needs to be installed using sysinstall by selecting the FreeBSD boot manager on the screen which asks if you wish to use a boot manager. This is because /boot/boot0 has the partition table area filled with NULL characters but sysinstall copies the partition table before copying /boot/boot0 to the MBR. "When the FreeBSD boot manager runs it records the last OS booted by setting the active flag on the partition table entry for that OS and then writes the whole 512-bytes of itself back to the MBR so if you just copy /boot/boot0 to C:\BOOTSECT.BSD then it writes an empty partition table, with the active flag set on one entry, to the MBR." --------------------------------- Well, I read that to mean that if I installed /boot/boot0 with sysinstall, THEN i should copy /boot/boot0 to C:\bootsect.bsd. I did this by following instructions I found elsewhere. In FreeBSD, I tried this: dd if=/dev/ad1 of=c:\bootbaby.sec bs=512 count=1 (I figured that by calling it "bootbaby.sec", I'd rename it later to bootsect.bsd, which is what the NT loader dual boot item was set at from a previous failed attempt.) I may also have copied /boot/boot0 to c:\bootsect.bsd from off the CD. I don't remember at this point -- I've been panicking for about 3 hours now. Anyway... the point is this: My NT loader got screwed up, and now I can't even get into that disk (Windows XP is on the Primary Master, ad0, and FreeBSD is on the Primary Slave, ad1). I've tried creating a boot disk: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305595 and even added some options, as suggested here: http://tweakhomepc.virtualave.net/dual/rescuebootdisk.html (and I used his exact boot.ini -- don't know what the original boot.ini was, but his seems about right)... but nothing's working. The error I get from that one is: "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information." Now, this might not seem like a FreeBSD issue, since it's the Windows XP disk I can't get into, but it was the FreeBSD boot loader that got me into this mess. The FreeBSD warning was: "Warning: DO NOT SIMPLY COPY /boot/boot0 INSTEAD OF /boot/boot1, YOU WILL OVERWRITE YOUR PARTITION TABLE AND RENDER YOUR COMPUTER UN-BOOTABLE! and although I was very careful about this and I was sure I WASN'T doing what they were warning me against... I think that's what has happened. How do I fix this? I've even tried attaching the drive to another computer (Win XP) as a Slave, to see if I could "SEE" the contents of the drive, but I can't. Please don't tell me this disk is gone. There's got to be a way to re-create the original partition table or re-write a new one that will see the disk's contents, etc.??? This has been a very bad day for me. PLEASE help, I'm begging. Thanks. OZ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com
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