Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2005 10:04:12 +0400 From: Rakhesh Sasidharan <rakhesh.s@gmail.com> To: Mark Ovens <marko@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Booting FreeBSD-5.3 from NTLDR Message-ID: <38b3f6e405013122047a2b8206@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <41FE578F.60706@freebsd.org> References: <38b3f6e40501292247696b96b@mail.gmail.com> <38b3f6e4050130033551e43818@mail.gmail.com> <20050130120618.GA21695@alzatex.com> <38b3f6e4050130235957c049c2@mail.gmail.com> <41FDEFE7.1090204@freebsd.org> <38b3f6e40501310216de768e@mail.gmail.com> <20050131103523.GC8619@alzatex.com> <41FE17A7.3030006@freebsd.org> <38b3f6e4050131074327d2e583@mail.gmail.com> <41FE578F.60706@freebsd.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 16:06:39 +0000, Mark Ovens <marko@freebsd.org> wrote: > Hehe! I did it the hard way; I manually recreated the partition table - > 3 partitions! In fact.....[roots around in drawer]......yes, still got > the printout of the spreadsheet I used to calculated the start and end > CHS values - don't know why, the disk was replaced ages ago :-) Hehe! How did u manually recreate the partition table? U had the sizes and sectors etc stored somewhere? On my previous machine, I used to have fdisk listings of all my disks as a printout -- coz I've done this kind of goofups many a times, and so usually have been careful to keep a listing of the sector values etc. But this time, I was on my parents' machine, and since I hadn't really started using it big time, I was careless enough not to take a precaution like this. (But I guess I was not thaaat careless enough to not take backups either, hehe!) I was lucky to find this demo program called Active Partition UnEraser or something. Being demo, it would only show me the starting and ending sectors of all the partitions -- but that was fine with me coz once I got those values, it was just a matter of noting them down and then booting into Linux (coz that's what I had apart from FreeBSD) and recreating the tables using its fdisk program. :)) > IRCC, boot0 is the MBR and boot1 is the boot sector (of the FreeBSD > partition (slice)) and they only ontain info about the local disk, i.e. > _relative_ info in effect, so if FreeBSD is on your second disk and you > copy boot1 to C:\BOOTSECT.BSD and add an entry for it in BOOT.INI then > NTLDR has know way of knowing that it refers to the second HDD and so > can't boot because the info doesn't match the layout of the first HDD. > Remember boot0 and boot1 are restricted to 512bytes - one sector. That > is the reason as far as remember. Oh yeah ... doh! Silly me! Ofcourse boot1 contains the info relative to the FreeBSD disk, so copying it across to C:\BOOTSECT.BSD wont help! Silly me! :)) So that's why copying boot1 and loader didn't help -- coz they were all relative to the FreeBSD disk. And copying boot0 too didnt help coz of the MBR re-writing thingy. :p What magic does BootPart do, I still wonder! I mean, if its just extracting the bootsectors as the program says, then an alternative way of extracting (like "dd" etc) too should work! But they dont -- meaning, BootPart does more than just extracting, I guess. -- -- Rakhesh rax@rakhesh.com
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?38b3f6e405013122047a2b8206>