Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 18 Feb 2003 05:15:15 -0800
From:      David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>
To:        Tim Bishop <tim-lists@bishnet.net>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, T.D.Bishop@ukc.ac.uk
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD Boot Manager rendering disk un-bootable
Message-ID:  <20030218131515.GA77992@HAL9000.homeunix.com>
In-Reply-To: <20030218105616.GA569@raq15.uk2net.com>
References:  <20030218105616.GA569@raq15.uk2net.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Thus spake Tim Bishop <tim-lists@bishnet.net>:
> I'm testing vinum on FreeBSD 4.7 in preparation for building a
> server. However, I seem to have come across a problem with the Boot
> Manager.
> 
> During installation I selected both disks to be entirely FreeBSD, and
> both to have the FreeBSD Boot Manager. This all worked fine.
> 
> At boot time I got presented with two options; "FreeBSD" and "Drive
> 1". Selecting "FreeBSD" booted fine. Next time round I selected "Drive
> 1" and got presented with "FreeBSD" and "Drive 0". I selected "FreeBSD"
> and again it booted fine. All going well so far.
> 
> Then I tried to boot up normally off the first drive and got told "Not
> found any [active partition] in HDD", followed by "DISK BOOT FAILURE,
> INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". At this point I figured maybe it
> was a disk failure, and this gave me an opportunity to test vinum.

BootEasy is a very simple 512-byte boot manager.  It expects to be
loaded from the BIOS boot device; there's no room to add sanity
checks in case someone installs it on something else.  What you
apparently managed to do is use your boot loader on your first
disk to load BootEasy on your second disk.  BootEasy then wrote
itself, including the partition table for the second disk, back to
the first disk.  If you rewrite the partition table your disk
should be fine.

There's already an old PR open about this.  I don't think there's
much that can be done, other than documenting the caveat better.

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20030218131515.GA77992>