From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Feb 1 09:04:33 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id JAA10341 for questions-outgoing; Thu, 1 Feb 1996 09:04:33 -0800 (PST) Received: from hp.com (hp.com [15.255.152.4]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id JAA10335 for ; Thu, 1 Feb 1996 09:04:27 -0800 (PST) Received: from hposl03.cup.hp.com by hp.com with SMTP (1.37.109.16/15.5+ECS 3.3) id AA126194244; Thu, 1 Feb 1996 09:04:07 -0800 Received: by hposl03.cup.hp.com (1.37.109.4/15.5+IOS 3.20+cup+OMrelay) id AA06525; Thu, 1 Feb 96 09:10:08 -0800 From: John Fenwick Message-Id: <9602011710.AA06525@hposl03.cup.hp.com> Subject: Install/Configuration questions To: questions@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 01 Feb 1996 9:10:07 PST Cc: fenwick@hposl03.cup.hp.com X-Mailer: Elm [revision: 109.14] Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk Hello, I am trying to understand the operation of the FreeBSD boot managers to solve some install difficulties. The install target is a SCSI disk PC. Perhaps you can shed some light on these questions. * Is the boot manager - either booteasy or osbs - typically installed in the first 60-odd sectors of a boot disk, and if so is it installed on top of what existing DOS boot manager may have already been there? * Using one particular install configuration results in only the first 17 sectors of the disk being used to install the boot manager. What has been installed in this case, and why is it different from the 62 or 63 sectors noted above? * If I overwrite my current Win95-installed boot manager by installing one from BSD, would I be able to recover the original Win95-installed boot manager by running the DOS "fdisk /mbr" command? * Are the install tools for boot managers available under UNIX, or are they only available under the DOS tools on the CDROM? If I wanted to migrate my BSD installation to a different disk, would I be able to copy the boot sectors also? Would "dd" be able to do the copy in this case? * Can you recommend some documentation that would describe where such things as the locations and sizes of partition tables, disk labels, and boot managers, are typically found on boot disks? Much thanks for any pointers. - John Fenwick