From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jun 5 1:31: 5 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from piranha.uk.radan.com (radan.demon.co.uk [158.152.75.22]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7D19037B824 for ; Mon, 5 Jun 2000 01:30:57 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Mark.Ovens@uk.radan.com) Received: by piranha.uk.radan.com; id JAA27260; Mon, 5 Jun 2000 09:30:17 +0100 (BST) Received: from nodnsquery(172.16.1.10) by piranha.uk.radan.com via smap (V4.0) id xma027251; Mon, 5 Jun 00 09:29:40 +0100 Organisation: Radan Computational Ltd., Bath, UK. Phone: +44 1225 320320 Fax: +44 1225 320311 Received: from uk.radan.com (parish [172.16.15.98]) by uk.radan.com (8.9.1b+Sun/8.9.1) with ESMTP id JAA06292 for ; Mon, 5 Jun 2000 09:29:50 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: <393B7251.A1A21923@uk.radan.com> Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 09:26:41 +0000 From: Mark Ovens X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: PC won't boot, Trashed partition table? Help required Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Apologies if this is rather long but I've lost 'net access at home so am sending this from work and want to include as much info as I can since I can't check things. My PC will no longer boot due, I believe, to a trashed partition table. I triple boot Win95, NT4, Freebsd 4-STABLE using the NT boot manager. The system is spread over 2 disks: Disk 0 512MB FAT - Win95 ~320MB UFS - /, var, swap rest of disk is NTFS in an extended partition Disk 1 Whole disk is UFS, /usr (*not* dangerously dedicated) To allow FreeBSD to boot from the NT loader I copy /boot/boot1 to C:\BOOTSECT.BSD and add an entry to C:\BOOT.INI. This has been set up this way for years. After doing a make world I check if /boot/boot1 has changed by diff(1)'ing it against C:\BOOTSECT.BSD and if different copying the former to the latter. Last night I did this (copied boot1) and re-booted. I have a habit of selecting FreeBSD from the NT menu and hitting RETRUN 3 times to start it booting and bypass the "twirling baton" and 10-second countdown. Instead of booting I saw: F5 Drive 1 Default F5 _ It took me a couple of minutes to realize that I'd copied boot0, not boot1. OK, just re-boot and copy the old BOOTSECT.BSD back (yes, I'd backed it up), however on reboot, instead of the NT loader menu I just got the "F5 Drive 1" display and no boot. It took a while to realize that the FreeBSD boot manager remembers the last partition booted and the only place it can store this info is in the MBR, so it had written a copy of itself to the MBR. No problem, just boot from the NT setup disks, select Repair and tell it to repair the boot sector (the NT equivalent of FDISK /MBR). NT complained that it couldn't find a valid NT install to repair, unless I had the Emergency Repair Disk (I had made one, but can't find it :( ). Booting from a DOS floppy resulted in "Invalid drive specification" when trying to change to C:. I booted from another floppy which has the command line version of Partition Magic on it. PM saw the whole of the first disk as free space (yes it can recognize UFS partitions). The only option left was to FDISK /MBR, but now all I get is "PRESS A KEY TO REBOOT" when booting from the HD. All this suggests that the partition table is trashed, but why? Surely boot0 should only affect the MBR, not the partition table. Any idea what has happened here? Is it the partition table that is trashed? Is there a way of recovering without having to re-install everything? Can anyone help me here please? Please Cc: me as I've no access to my list e-mail at the moment. TIA. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message