Fun with 'fdisk -B -b /boot/boot0 ad0'

From: Andrew Lankford (arlankfo_at_141.com)
Date: 07/24/03

  • Next message: Terry Lambert: "Re: How to provide useful debug info"
    Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 00:10:10 -0600
    To: "Ryan T. Dean" <rtdean@cytagen.com>
    
    

    >I was hoping that someone might have an idea, as
    >I've exhausted all of mine for the time being.

    Boot0 is just a boot menu whose contents are in sector0 of your
    hard disk. Another boot block (most likely the contents of
    boot1) should located at or near the beginning of
    your freebsd slice. This is done with the -B option of bsdlabel
    (formerly disklabel). For all I know something to the effect of
    typing "bsdlabel -e -B ad0s2_or_whateveryourfbsdsliceis" and
    then exiting without making any changes to the displayed table
     of fbsd partitions may do the trick. Hopefully some experts
     will chime in with better suggestions if I'm dead wrong.

     Certainly, the bsdlabel man page is your friend. In any case,
     I once botched gentoo linux on a neighboring slice and corrupted my freebsd -CURRENT disklabel so that I couldn't even
    boot by way of a floppy, but with the disklabel (bsdlabel)
    command on a 5.x install cd, I successfully created an
    identical new one right over the old corrupted one and I didn't
     lose any data. "Your mileage may vary."

    Another (possibly easier, safer) option is set up and use the
    windows boot manager to choose between w2000 or freebsd. You
    need to copy /boot/boot1 over to your windows partition (give
     it a unique name like "myfbsdboot.bin") and then add a few
     lines to C:\BOOT.INI to the effect of:

    C:\myfbsdboot.bin="FreeBSD5.x_CURRENT Partition"

    Put it after the line that mentions the windows boot block, which ought to look similar to this:

    [operating systems]
    multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Media Center Edition" /fastdetect /noserialmice /sos

    There is some sort of wizard/menu in windows that can
    walk you through all this so that you don't have to pull up
    C:\boot.ini directly (or create one from scratch perhaps).

    Hope this helps.

    Andrew Lankford

     
                       
    _______________________________________________
    freebsd-current@freebsd.org mailing list
    http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
    To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-current-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"


  • Next message: Terry Lambert: "Re: How to provide useful debug info"

    Relevant Pages

    • Re: F7-x86-64 Stopped Booting - GRUB Issue
      ... Are you getting the grub prompt right away, ... it would appear that grub has replaced your Windows boot loader (which ... but when selecting to boot into Linux you get the ...
      (Fedora)
    • Re: Unable to access primary drive after using BCDEdit
      ... operating system (C: Vista Home Premium and G: Vista Ultimate). ... modifying the boot order etc, I am now unable to boot (C: ... description Windows Boot Manager ...
      (microsoft.public.windows.vista.installation_setup)
    • Re: F7-x86-64 Stopped Booting - GRUB Issue - Fixed!
      ... the Windows boot loader lists the ... /boot partition to run GRUB. ...
      (Fedora)
    • Re: lilo install problem
      ... >> which probably means that I got a boot sector problem. ... >> by using a windows boot disk, I'm able to access the windows disk, ...
      (comp.os.linux.setup)
    • Re: SP2 prevents usin our XP-CDs?
      ... Make sure you change your system bios settings to allow you to boot from your CD drive first. ... You can also create a windows boot disk that will allow you ... will work quite well (I've done them both on my SP2 system with my SP1a CD): ...
      (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)

    Loading