Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 00:51:01 +0000 From: RW <list-freebsd-2004@morbius.sent.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: How to boot FreeBSD from a slave IDE disk Message-ID: <200411270051.02080.list-freebsd-2004@morbius.sent.com> In-Reply-To: <20041126042638.91826.qmail@web51108.mail.yahoo.com> References: <20041126042638.91826.qmail@web51108.mail.yahoo.com>
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On Friday 26 November 2004 04:26, rain cip wrote: > Hello, > > I hope I can get some help from this list to figure out how to boot FreeBSD > from a slave drive. My PC has two disks. The sysinstall sees both: ad0 > and ad3. My hardware configuration is such: > > ad0 -- primary IDE, master (all for Win2k) > ad3 -- secondary IDE, slave (all for FreeBSD 5.3) > > No more device on the primary IDE while a CD drive acts as the master on > the secondary IDE. It's not in general a very good idea to mix a CD drive and a hard drive on the same ide channel since they operate at the speed of the slower device. > I used the entire space on ad3 for a FreeBSD 5.3 release installation while > the ad0 contains my old Win 2k. The problem now is that I can't boot > FreeBSD at all even though I had selected "install boot manager" during the > installation. The PC went straight to Win2k every time I booted. I tried > to reboot from the distribution CDROM and used the FDISK utility to make > sure that the FreeBSD slice is flagged as "A=" but it did nothing. In the > BIOS setting, I selected the slave drive, i.e. ad3, to be the first boot > device, and the ad0 to be second. Still, I couldn't get to FreeBSD. I think that once you have installed a boot manager on the ad3 MBR, the active partition doesn't really mean anything. > It appears to me that I did not have the boot manager installed on the ad0. > But when I tried to "install boot manager" onto the ad0, the fdisk gave me > no hint where to write the MBR. Basically what I did was: > > select "install boot manager" > select "ad0" > hit the "q" key > select "install boot manager" > select "ad3" > hit the "q" key I've never actually used the FreeBSD Boot manager, so I can't really comment on that. What you might do is install a standard MBR on ad3 and set your bios to boot that device. Once you have FreeBSD running, you can install GRUB from ports/packages, and put that on ad0. Alternately if you have some kind of Linux live cd, you might install lilo from that.
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