From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Nov 27 00:50:12 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 76EDA16A4D0 for ; Sat, 27 Nov 2004 00:50:12 +0000 (GMT) Received: from out2.smtp.messagingengine.com (out2.smtp.messagingengine.com [66.111.4.26]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 24EE943D39 for ; Sat, 27 Nov 2004 00:50:12 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from list-freebsd-2004@morbius.sent.com) Received: from frontend2.messagingengine.com (frontend2.internal [10.202.2.151]) by frontend1.messagingengine.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 54866C3C450 for ; Fri, 26 Nov 2004 19:50:10 -0500 (EST) X-Sasl-enc: t/14VE+Hiq4vLd/mhouagw 1101516608 Received: from gumby.localhost (unknown [80.41.13.3]) by frontend2.messagingengine.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 41836570125 for ; Fri, 26 Nov 2004 19:50:07 -0500 (EST) From: RW To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 00:51:01 +0000 User-Agent: KMail/1.7.1 References: <20041126042638.91826.qmail@web51108.mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <20041126042638.91826.qmail@web51108.mail.yahoo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200411270051.02080.list-freebsd-2004@morbius.sent.com> Subject: Re: How to boot FreeBSD from a slave IDE disk X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 00:50:12 -0000 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.