Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 18:12:32 -0700 (PDT) From: Mark Terribile <materribile@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Problems trying to boot from an 80GB Message-ID: <20030915011232.29847.qmail@web21107.mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <20030914190049.86E0516A4C3@hub.freebsd.org>
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Sean and Andrew, I'm no expert, but two things strike me as odd. Perhaps some greater Guru can tell us whether or not they represent a problem. >> I'm trying to get my first FreeBSD (4.8-RELEASE) >> installation working, ... >> Next, I created a NTFS partition on the drive >> with an XP install CD, ... >> Out of other ideas, I resorted to "Dangerous >> Dedicated", which ... gave a different error: >> No /boot/loader >> Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel boot: >> No /kernel As I understand it (and check the man page for boot(8)) the MBR boot record has to pull a larger boot program from the partition or slice (?) which pulls in a Forth interpreter and a Forth program. It is this loader which gives you the initial messages about `8 seconds to boot' and allows you to interrupt it, chose another kernel file, set sysctl variables, etc. This loader has to be able to read the root directory on the file system. I see two possible problems. First, the loader has to know how to read the root directory and find the blocks of the file. Can it do this if the file system is an NTFS file system? (I understand NTFS to mean one of the Windows FS types.) Second, if you use the Dangerously Dedicated structure, with no FreeBSD slice table, is there a place for the second stage boot block and the boot loader to be stored? Mark Terribile ---------------------------------------------------- A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.” Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked. From _The New Hacker's Dictionary_, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon, maintained by Eric S. Raymond __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
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