Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:53:57 -0400 From: Andrew Lankford <lankfordandrew@charter.net> To: Yuri <yuri@rawbw.com>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Failure to boot from HD formatted not by FreeBSD Message-ID: <4AE0FEA5.9070004@charter.net>
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Looks to me like you're trying to get your computer to dual-boot Vista and FreeBSD 8.0, something I finally succeeded in doing. If by "MBR" you mean the first-stage boot program (512 bytes), I couldn't get that to work, nor could I use the standard boot0 menu from FreeBSD. I'm using the windows boot program instead. I think what I did was copy "/boot/boot1" from my root partition to my NTFS partition and then added an option to the Windows boot menu to boot with it. I get the GEOM "track boundary" complaint when I boot up as well. The FBSD 8.0 kernel has a new option 'GEOM_PART_MBR" on by default. Vista insisted on partitioning my drive, so if the new partition handler doesn't like it, it can lump it. In order to get the 8.0 kernel to recognise your old partitions, you need the "GEOM_MBR" option activated. That means you need to load "geom_mbr.ko" into memory before you load and boot from the 8.0 kernel. If you're booting from a FreeBSD 8.0 CD directly into sysinstall, you can escape to a shell and kldload geom_mbr.ko, but you have to then restart sysinstall without rebooting the computer in order for your hard disk partitions to show up. The only reliable way I could find to restart systinstall without rebooting was by pressing the power button. Wierd, eh? I added "option GEOM_MBR" back into my kernel, recompiled, fiddled with my network settings, and now everything seems to work alright. Anyway, all this procedure should be 75% correct since I've managed to successfully upgrade to 8.0 from 7-stable this way. For all I know, I might end up with a corrupted partition six months from now. Either that or Marcel Moolenar will get angry at me. Regards, Andrew Lankford
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