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Date:      Mon, 13 Dec 1999 00:00:00 -0800 (PST)
From:      Nick Johnson <freebsd@spatula.net>
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   booteasy clearing active flags
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.9912122327500.29468-100000@web2.sea.nwserv.com>

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Got a strange one.  System configuration looks like this:

2 IDE drives, Windows 98 on Primary IDE controller master; FreeBSD 3.3 on
Secondary IDE master.  Booteasy, through a course of installations is
installed on both drives.  Both disks have one primary partition, and both
are initially set active/bootable.  Disk 0 (IDE 1) is a 4 gig drive, and
disk 1 (with FreeBSD installed) is a 1 gig drive.  Both are set to LBA
mode in the BIOS.

The problem is that upon booting with booteasy, the active flag on the
primary (and only) partition on the primary IDE controllor (the Windows 98
partition) is cleared, so that upon rebooting, either the BIOS or Booteasy
(pretty sure it's Booteasy) complains that there is no active partition,
and refuses to go any further.  I was forced each time to boot with a
Windows boot disk, run fdisk, set the partition active, and reboot.

I should also mention that this Booteasy was installed using bootinst.exe
and boot.bin from tools directory, but had the same effect when installed
using the 3.3 release floppies.  Also, Booteasy was unable to identify the
Windows 98 partition as "DOS"; instead it said "F1 - ??".

So now I wonder if this could be an issue caused by having Booteasy
installed on both IDE controllers, or possibly having an active partition
on both disks (although I've never had a problem with either of these
before), or something really weird is going on.

If anyone has any ideas about what could be going on here, or if there is
some more information I can provide to clarify an issue, please let me
know.  I see from searching the mailing lists that this problem has
surfaced several times with others in similar configurations, but it looks
like the only solution has been to install a different boot manager.

   Nick

--
"Any state that fails to recognize the dignity and worth of the individual-
 that state is obsolete."
  - Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone: The Obsolete Man)
My PGP public key:    http://www.spatula.net/pubkey.txt
Nick Johnson, version 1.5	http://www.spatula.net/




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