Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 10:30:58 +0000 From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@pobox.com> To: freebsd-i386@freebsd.org Subject: boot0cfg required before booting >8GB ? Message-ID: <20061204103058.GA12800@uk.tiscali.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hello, I installed FreeBSD 6.1 on a HP/Compaq i386 machine with two 20GB partitions - FreeBSD went in the first, and the second was spare. All was well. I let FreeBSD put its own bootloader in the MBR. I then installed OpenBSD 4.0 in the second partition. Unfortunately, it was unable to boot OpenBSD. When the machine started, it offered me F1 FreeBSD F2 BSD but when I pressed F2, it just went beep. I mistakenly assumed that this was a problem with OpenBSD (partly due to an error in their own INSTALL.i386 which still cautions against installing OpenBSD above cylinder 1024) Anyway, to cut a long story short, I've now been able to solve this problem simply by reinstalling the FreeBSD MBR, using boot0cfg -B -v ad0 and F2 happily boots OpenBSD. When I ran boot0cfg, it reported that it was using options=packet,update,nosetdrv which is reasonable enough - the boot0cfg manpage says these are the defaults. The issue is: why didn't this work first time with the MBR installed during the FreeBSD installation program? Unfortunately, I did not take a copy of the MBR before overwriting it with boot0cfg. But my guess (and it's only a guess) is that at install time the MBR is being written with options=nopacket If this is the case, perhaps it ought to be changed to match the current boot0cfg default, to be able to use modern BIOSes in most machines? Or at least, could this be noted in the installation documentation? (My apologies if it already is. A google for "site:www.freebsd.org boot0cfg" turns up a few pages about boot0cfg, but I could find nothing which indicates that you may need to re-run boot0cfg after an initial install if you want the full functionality of booting above the 8GB boundary) Regards, Brian.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20061204103058.GA12800>