Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 10:50:27 +0900 From: Joel <rees@ddcom.co.jp> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Booting from DOS? Message-ID: <20050510101201.6CDE.REES@ddcom.co.jp> In-Reply-To: <ab68a2d7b28546d563b21fcade4cbc78@sbcglobal.net> References: <ab68a2d7b28546d563b21fcade4cbc78@sbcglobal.net>
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On Sun, 8 May 2005 16:17:58 -0700 Ron Hudson <ron.hudson@sbcglobal.net> wrote > FreeBSD-Current said to ask you people. > > > > I have just installed 5.3 fbsd_user's post rang a bell. I'm probably going to describe this wrong, but I'll give it a shot. > > I have a 100mb dos partition, 70mb swap and the rest of the 2gb hard > > drive as one bsd slice > > > > The BSD slice is all one filesystem "/" I have Fedora Core, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD multi-booting on a sempron box at home. I ended up using the Fedora Core low-level boot manager, but that's GRUB now. GRUB apparently needs to be in the first BIOS-level (fdisk) partition. But OpenBSD needs its root (disklabel) partition entirely below the 8 GB boundary. So I cut a smallish BIOS-level partition for Fedora Core's boot partition, followed that with a largish BIOS-level partition for OpenBSD, cut a largish BIOS-level partition for the rest of Fedora Core, and gave the rest of the disk to FreeBSD. (I actually have NetBSD booting off a second disk as well, but that probably isn't relevant.) It seems a little quirky, because Fedora Core's GRUB puts up its screen, then, if one of the BSDs is selected, the boot manager for that puts up its screen. > > When my system boots it gives: > > > > F1 . . . DOS > > F2 . . . FreeBSD > > > > Default F? > > > > When I press F1 I get DOS > > > > When I press F2 the boot prompt repeats. > > > > I have tried to BOOTINST again. The same thing remains. > > > > What's wrong? > > > > Is there a way to boot BSD from DOS? > > > > Thanks for your help. Not sure I could say what's wrong, but it's possible that the low-level boot manager may prefer to have a unix style partition to work out of. Thus, I'll echo fbsd_user's suggestion. If that doesn't work, you might try using fdisk to set the active partition to the one you want to boot from, maybe keeping DOS in the first BIOS-level partition, but setting the second BIOS-level partition as the active partition before installing FreeBSD and FreeBSD's boot manager. -- Joel Rees <rees@ddcom.co.jp> digitcom, inc. $B3t<02q<R%G%8%3%`(B Kobe, Japan +81-78-672-8800 ** <http://www.ddcom.co.jp>; **
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