From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Jan 31 05:32:39 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id FAA28678 for freebsd-stable-outgoing; Sun, 31 Jan 1999 05:32:39 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from itsdsv1.enc.edu (fw1.enc.edu [207.95.42.127]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id FAA28673 for ; Sun, 31 Jan 1999 05:32:36 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owensc@enc.edu) Received: from enc.edu ([10.1.255.3]) by itsdsv1.enc.edu (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id IAA13284; Sun, 31 Jan 1999 08:30:21 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <36B45C54.82BF98BE@enc.edu> Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 08:36:21 -0500 From: Charles Owens X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Greg Schohn , stable@FreeBSD.ORG, kingsled@enc.edu, Robert Nordier Subject: Re: disk problem at bootup... (me too!) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Greg, I believe I'm having the same problem that you are. I had my system running 2.2.7 just fine. I did a clean reinstall of 3.0-RELEASE: during the "fdisk" phase I said to my buddy, "I'm pretty sure that it will _not_ work to make a bootable drive dangerously dedicated." Rather than just go with what I has worked for years I decided to test my assertion by attempting to dangerously dedicate the disk (duh :-). As I'd expected I got an error during the commit phase. So I went back to the fdisk screen, redid things normally, and completed the install. When attempting the first boot I get a "missing operating system" error. I can get into the system by booting from the install floppy and typing "0:da(0,a)/boot/loader" at the first boot prompt. So I'm thinking that my messing around with dangerously dedicated mode must have screwed something up. Thus far I've done this to attempt to fix it: -- Booted the install disk. When to fdisk screen and did the normal thing I'd do during and install: Use all disk (_not_ dangerously dedicated), Set FBSD partition bootable. Then I hit 'W' to write it out. Didn't help. -- From the booted system (getting in via the on-floppy boot sector) I typed both: disklabel -B da0s1 and disklabel -B da0 I'm not quite sure if this was right, but it helped me as much as it helped you. In digging through the mail archives I've found some folks that seem to have had this problem in the past. Several people suggested that the installing DOS MBR via the DOS "fdisk /mbr" command would fix things. Isn't this what the above disklabel commands are supposed to do? What _is_ the correct way to do this from FreeBSD? Not that I'm _entirely_ opposed to doing it with the DOS utility. ;-) (I'm going to give this a try Monday.) Someone else pointed out that some motherboards have a BIOS setting by which the motherboard will prevent the writing of the boot sector... which can mess up FreeBSD install. Good point... I don't think that's my problem here though. I must admit I'm a bit unclear on how this is all arranged. Are there multiple "boot sectors" that get processed during boot up? One "MBR" for the whole disk and then another boot record that lives on each bootable slice? Thanks all, --- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Charles N. Owens Email: owensc@enc.edu http://www.enc.edu/~owensc Network & Systems Administrator Information Technology Services "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's Eastern Nazarene College best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message