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Date:      Sat, 12 May 2001 18:25:03 -0400
From:      cjm88@home.com
To:        Doug Russell <drussell@saturn-tech.com>
Cc:        "Hartmann, O." <ohartman@klima.physik.uni-mainz.de>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 4.3-STABLE Install problems, BOOT FAILURE after  freshinstallation
Message-ID:  <3AFDB83F.3DAFC615@home.com>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0105122133180.17454-100000@beastie.saturn-tech.com>

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Interesting... I had the problem with both 4.2 and 4.3... I am absolutely certain that I set the partition to 'Active' during the install
process and that I selected the 'Normal MBR' option when prompted for what to do.  I tested with a drive that had not been 'dangerously
dedicated' and everything worked fine... so... maybe the problem arises (or the bug is aggrevated) when doing an install on a device that had
been previously 'dangerously dedicated'.... the other symptom that I noticed is that when I tried to install again after a failed install... the
partition info was there but the partition that I had selected to be active was no longer marked active.

Thanks for your thoughts

C

Doug Russell wrote:

> On Sat, 12 May 2001 cjm88@home.com wrote:
>
> > I had the exact same problem with similar hardware.  My problem arose it, seemed, because the drive I was using had been previously
> > dangerously dedicated. After multiple failed installs I decided to see if I could create a DOS partition and format it with the /S option.
> > That worked so I tried installing FreeBSD again and everything worked fine from that point on.
>
> You probably neglected to write a standard boot manager to the disk.  This
> can be done in systinstall, but has historically not always worked
> correctly.  (You select Standard boot manager, but it installs None...)
> You can also always boot with a DOS diskette and use 'fdisk /mbr' to write
> a standard bot manager to the disk, or copy the first sector from a good
> disk to the offending one using something like (bs=512 should be default):
>
> 'dd if=/dev/xxx of=/dev/xxx bs=512 count=1'
>
> I've had to do this more than once before.  Perhaps this was your problem.
>
> Later......                                             <Doug>


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