From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Dec 7 3:32:51 2000 From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Dec 7 03:32:48 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from nordier.com (c3-dbn-22.dial-up.net [196.33.200.22]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8374437B400 for ; Thu, 7 Dec 2000 03:32:44 -0800 (PST) Received: (from rnordier@localhost) by nordier.com (8.11.1/8.11.1) id eB7BWcK01292; Thu, 7 Dec 2000 13:32:38 +0200 (SAST) (envelope-from rnordier) From: Robert Nordier Message-Id: <200012071132.eB7BWcK01292@nordier.com> Subject: Re: The trouble with boot0 To: chad@DCFinc.com Date: Thu, 7 Dec 2000 13:32:38 +0200 (SAST) Cc: jose@we.lc.ehu.es (Jose M. Alcaide), stable@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <200012070626.XAA08676@freeway.dcfinc.com> from "Chad R. Larson" at Dec 06, 2000 11:26:50 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Chad R. Larson wrote: > As I recall, Jose M. Alcaide wrote: > > I installed FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE into ad0s3 and, after that, pressing > > F3 for booting from ad0s3 only produces the famous beep. Note, > > however, that I can still boot from ad0s2 (which also contains FreeBSD > > and begins after cylinder 1023) and ad0s1. Only ad0s3 fails and I > > don't know why. I think that boot0 does not like a 3rd slice > > physically placed before the 2nd one. Is this a bug or a "feature"? > > I've got a 2.2.8 system that has a similar partitioning. It was set > up to dual-boot WniNT and FreeBSD, and I chose to convert the NT > partition to a second FreeBSD space. > > The problem I had seemed to be that the booter would try to boot the > first FreeBSD partition it found in the table. That was the > (former) NT space, as it had been physically first 'cause NT wouldn't > boot otherwise. It didn't matter that it wasn't marked as the > active partition, it just had to be first in the fdisk table. The > third partition in the table =was= marked as active, and had the > bootable root, but it never got that far. > > The fix I applied was to re-arrange the entries in the fdisk table. > That is, the partitions still used the same starting and ending > blocks, I just made the (physically) third partition be first in the > table. > > Works for me. > > Perhaps there wasn't room in the 512 byte booter to check for the > active flag under 2.2.8, but I'd think in the brave new world that > shouldn't be a problem. Up to 3.0R, after which the new boot code was deployed, the FreeBSD bootstrap supported only one FreeBSD partition per disk. So there was the issue that Chad describes. This was due to the old boot2 code, though, and wasn't a boot0 (or BootEasy, which was then in use) problem. Since 3.0-stable, the boot code has supported multiple FreeBSD partitions. -- Robert Nordier rnordier@nordier.com rnordier@FreeBSD.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message