*BSD News Article 66858


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From: sstorkel@actioneer.com (Scott Storkel)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: HELP: Boot Manager Problems
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 96 18:41:28 GMT
Organization: Actioneer, Inc.
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In article <4lbi2c$msq@ganesh.sdstate.edu>, hartzeld@cc.sdstate.edu (Dave Hartzell) wrote:
>This weekend I recently tried to install FreeBSD 2.1.0 off of FTP.  As far 
>as I can tell, the installation went well except for the Boot Manager part.
>
>I have two hard drives in my machine- a 130 and a 406 MB.  I put FreeBSD on 
>the second Partition of the 406 drive, which is my slave.  I have OS/2 on 
>the 130, DOS on the 1st partition of the 406 and now FreeBSD on the second 
>partition of the 406.
>
>Now when I attempt to boot my computer, I get a `Press any key to Reboot' 
>message.

I had a similar problem. My first disk is dedicated to Windows 95, while the 
second disk contains FreeBSD 2.1 and Windows NT.

You can use FDISK to fix the problem. Use it to reset the active partition on 
the primary hard drive. The FreeBSD installation program will have munged 
this.

It seems that the FreeBSD boot manager doesn't expect to get installed on the 
second drive. As near as I can tell, it munges the boot blocks on the first 
drive, but doesn't manage to run it's code from the second drive. Sure wish 
somebody from the FreeBSD project would fix this (or give me a kick in the 
right direction so that I can fix it)! When I asked about this before, I 
didn't get any responses. This is sort of surprising, since I'd think many 
people were running in this kind of a config.

In any event, the only thing I've found that can boot FreeBSD from a second 
drive is OS Boot Select (http://www.prz.tu-berlin.de/~wolf/os-bs.html).
Unfortunately, if you've already installed the NT boot loader, you're screwed: 
booting into 95 or NT will end up running the NT boot loader rather than 
booting the operating system directly :-(

BTW, once you install the OS-BS 2.0b8, it's there for good! :-(

I'm still looking for somebody who can tell me how to make this stuff work 
with the NT boot loader, my preferred approach...


-- Scott

==============================================================================
Scott Storkel					539 Bryant Street, Ste. 402
Software Engineer				San Francisco, CA. 94107
Actioneer, Inc.					415-882-4372 (FAX)
==============================================================================