From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Feb 5 19:44:10 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id TAA02290 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 5 Feb 1997 19:44:10 -0800 (PST) Received: from w2xo.pgh.pa.us (w2xo.pgh.pa.us [206.210.70.5]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id TAA02235 for ; Wed, 5 Feb 1997 19:43:44 -0800 (PST) Received: from w2xo.pgh.pa.us (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by w2xo.pgh.pa.us (8.8.4/8.8.4) with SMTP id WAA24229 for ; Wed, 5 Feb 1997 22:43:33 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <32F95364.2781E494@w2xo.pgh.pa.us> Date: Wed, 05 Feb 1997 22:43:32 -0500 From: Jim Durham Organization: Dis- X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.1.6-RELEASE i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: DOS partition trouble Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Twice now, I have removed a DOS partition from a disk with both DOS and FreeBSD partitions and been unable to boot FreeBSD. In the case today, it was partition 1 that was a DOS fat type partition. I wanted to remove that and use it for FreeBSD. Upon removing the partition with DOS FDISK, I was no longer able to boot the FreeBSD partition. The boot code appeared to be jumping off to nowhere. The boot manager menu would appear, then , when it tried to proceed with the boot, it would crash and reboot. After fooling with this for a couple of hours, I finally decided to try putting the DOS partition back, so I deleted the new FreeBSD partition and replaced it with a DOS partition. I formatted this and had no trouble booting DOS. I then ran the partition editor in sysinstall and wrote out a new boot Block. Voila! Now I can boot the FreeBSD (and the DOS) partitions. Why? I had tried running the partition editor when I had no DOS partition and it gave all indications of sucessfully writing out the boot block, but would not boot until I remade the DOS partition. Trying to mount the root directory from the MFS on the boot floppy gave a "bad super block" error. I thought I understood what was going on with the partition scheme, but I guess not. Can someone please proffer an explanation of this behavior? thanks Jim Durham