*BSD News Article 39427


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From: "A.M. Zanker" <A.M.Zanker@ncl.ac.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: disklabel -B has no effect.
Date: 12 Dec 1994 10:53:29 GMT
Organization: University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Lines: 33
Message-ID: <3cha39$40q@whitbeck.ncl.ac.uk>
References: <3c98u0$4st@whitbeck.ncl.ac.uk> <3ca1ck$50n@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: lakeb1.ncl.ac.uk
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Nate Williams (nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu) wrote:
> In article <3c98u0$4st@whitbeck.ncl.ac.uk>,
> A.M. Zanker <A.M.Zanker@ncl.ac.uk> wrote:
> >I have a strange problem with the FreeBSD 2.0R disklabel utility. I 
> >installed the system on my 2nd IDE drive (a 170MB IBM model) and decided 
> >to edit the bootblocks to allow default booting from this drive. Having 
> >successfully edited and recompiled bootwd and wdboot I proceeded to 
> >install them with "disklabel -B wd1". However, the boot blocks on the 
> >disk were completely unaffected by this (as od -c /dev/rwd1c revealed).
> >I tried a number of other incantations of the disklabel command without 
> >success.

> I'll bet the boot blocks on wd1 were affected by this, but since DOS
> only allows booting from the 1st disk, it wouldn't do you any good.

> There are boot managers which recognize the partitions on the second
> drive and allow you to boot from them, but they over-write the MBR on
> the first drive.

The boot blocks definitely *weren't* affected. I changed the boot
message in boot.c so that I could specifically check whether they
had been changed on disk. Running sysinstall changed the blocks on
my *second* hard disk (as, like I said before, examining /dev/rwd1c
confirmed). Examining wd0 directly showed *no* boot blocks, but only
the boot manager.

Regards,

Mike
--
Mike Zanker                              | A.M.Zanker@ncl.ac.uk
Department of Mathematics and Statistics |
University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK    | PGP public key available