Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 11:51:58 -0400 (EDT) From: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@clunix.cl.msu.edu> To: doug@polands.org (Doug Poland) Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Hosed my MBR? Message-ID: <200604141551.k3EFpwNJ002744@clunix.cl.msu.edu> In-Reply-To: <20060414154304.GC32858@polands.org>
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> > On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 01:27:03PM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote: > > > > > > On Tue, April 11, 2006 09:08, Jerry McAllister wrote: > > > >> > > > >> I'm in a bit of a mess here. I've got an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe > > > >> motherboard with two on-board SATA RAID controllers, an Intel > > > >> MatrixRAID (ICH5R) and Promise Fasttrak (PDC20378). My BIOS > > > >> allows me to boot from either the Promise or the Intel > > > >> controller. > > > >> > > > > > > > > Well, the install CD is also the fixit CD. You can try booting > > > > from it and choosing the shell and then trying to run the fdisk > > > > from that environment to replace the MBR. > > > > > > > > I have done that for people who have hosed their MBR on machines > > > > with Ghost - even their XP only, no FreeBSD, systems, using the > > > > FreeBSD fixit, I ran fdisk and replaced the MBR with the FreeBSD > > > > MBR and it worked just fine. > > > > > > > Hi Jerry, > > > > > > I think the root of my confusion here is the fact that I have two > > > RAID controllers and can boot off either controller. > > > > > > Does that mean I have two MBR's, one for each controller? If that's > > > the case and I boot off a CD-ROM, which MBR am I fixing? > > > > Are both controllers part of the same raid device? > > > no, as I said in my OP, each controller hosts a RAID1. The Intel has > two disks for Win, and the FastTrak has two disks dedicated to FreeBSD. > > > Anyway, there needs to be an MBR on each bootable device as well as > > the boot files. I think that holds true for raid setups as well. > > > > In addition, the first bootable device that your BIOS sees must have > > an MBR regardless of whether you have 1 or more bootable devices. > > > > In your case, it sounds like you have two raid devices, one on each > > controller. You would have to have an MBR on each and it sounds like > > you think you wiped the one on the INTEL controller. Figure out what > > device name the raid on the INTEL controller comes up as and then > > write the MBR to that. > > > Thanks for your response. My follow-up question to you is how would > running a FBSD fdisk command on the Intel controller fix a hosed WinXP > MBR? Or is an MBR OS agnostic? Well, the FreeBSD MBR is. I have used a FreeBSD MBR to fix a hosed MBR (hosed by Ghost) on an XP only (eg. no FreeBSD on it) machine and it worked fine. I suspect it might not work in the reverse direction, though. The MS MBR is not known for playing nice with other OS boot sectors. I don't know what the difference it. Is there some other disk and [preferrably SCSI] controller you can stick in and install FreeBSD on and try to mount and check out the raid that you think is hosed before doing anything irreversable? I forgot if you said you had tried looking at it with a fixit disk but that might work if the raid is hardware raid. ////jerry > > -- > Regards, > Doug >
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