*BSD News Article 90624


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From: steranka@steranka.com (Patrick Steranka)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: How to boot from the 2nd DOS partiiton
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 1997 21:20:47 -0500
Organization: Erol's Internet Services
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I want to boot from a floppy and and start up FreeBSD, but I don't
know how to tell the boot: prompt to load from the 1st BSDs slice
(wd0s2a).

I have installed FreeBSD onto a system that has Win-95 on it.  The
DOS partitions are like this:
    I have one 3.2 GIG Disk:
	C: 1.6 GIG
	D: 1.6 GIG (this is were I installed FreeBSD).

The install went without a hitch.  I chose NOT to install the boot 
manager (maybe that is were I went wrong).  I found two problems:
(1) When I finished installing FreeBSD, the D: (partition)
    was marked as "active", so by default I booted automatically
    into FreeBSD.  This wasn't a problem for long.  I booted from
    a Win-95 floppy and ran FDISK and marked the C: (partition)
    as the active one, and I am back to booting Win-95 by default.

(2) When I boot from the FreeBSD floppy, I wasn't able to tell the
    bootstrap loader to boot from (/dev/wd0s2a).  I tried:
	wd(2,a)kernel
	wd(2,a)/kernel
	wd(0,a)kernel
	1:wd(0,a)kernel

    Oh well, all these failed.  Most returned an infinite spew of
    messages in the format:
	Error: D: 0x81 C:0 H:1 S:1
    note the 0x81, changed to 0x82, 0x83.

I haven't fully RTFM'ed (but I have looked some :-)), so please
forgive me if this is a straight forward question/answer. 
-- 
Patrick Steranka
steranka@steranka.com
wk: 301-680-3343