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Date: Thu, 15 Jun 1995 16:30:58 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199506150630.QAA01865@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: jkh@FreeBSD.org, rwatson@clark.net
Subject: Re: originally a newsgroup post, but news server here isn't working
Cc: bugs@FreeBSD.org
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>At this point I'm a little hesitant to reinstall again from scratch, 
>because over this ppp line its about 6 hours a throw, and I've lost my 
>dos partition several times so far.  Speaking of which, there may be a 
>bug in your dos partition handling -- once I rebooted and booted dos, I 
>discovered a looped directory pointer -- I have d: mounted to /dos under 
>freebsd, and had a /bin directory in it.  When I next looked under dos, 
>there was a bi directory entry in bi pointing back to bin again.  under 

Renaming of directories is quite broken for msdosfs.  The following
would create a looped directory:

	cd /dos
	mv bin bi	# where bin is a dir and bi doesn't exist

This destroys the "." entry in bin by overwriting it with "bi".

>At this point, from my point of view, the best possible thing would be 
>quick instructions as to how to make the boot manager load onto wd0 so I 
>could boot freebsd off of wd1/a.  Right now it just goes straight to dos 
>booting off of c: (wd0) but if I stick in the boot floppy, boot to the 
>boot manager, and tell it wd(1/a) it boots to freebsd fine.  So I just 

Er, the program that you tell wd(1,a) too isn't a boot manager.  It's just
the FreeBSD boot loader.  Once it is loaded, it can boot from any partition
on the first FreeBSD slice on any drive (except DiskManaged hard drives
when the DM software hasn't been loaded by a previous stage in the
bootstrap, e.g., after booting from a FreeBSD floppy).  You need a disk
manager on the MBR or on its own partition to load the FreeBSD boot loader
if the FreeBSD slice isn't active.

Bruce