From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue May 10 01:50:32 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 24C0616A4EB for ; Tue, 10 May 2005 01:50:32 +0000 (GMT) Received: from proxy.ddcom.co.jp (proxy.ddcom.co.jp [211.121.191.163]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1DAB343D53 for ; Tue, 10 May 2005 01:50:31 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from rees@ddcom.co.jp) Received: (qmail 20488 invoked by alias); 10 May 2005 02:02:04 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO matthew) (10.10.10.11) by mail.ddcom.local with SMTP; 10 May 2005 02:02:04 -0000 Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 10:50:27 +0900 From: Joel To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: References: Message-Id: <20050510101201.6CDE.REES@ddcom.co.jp> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-2022-JP" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Becky! ver. 2.00.06 Subject: Re: Booting from DOS? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 01:50:32 -0000 On Sun, 8 May 2005 16:17:58 -0700 Ron Hudson 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 digitcom, inc. 株式会社デジコム Kobe, Japan +81-78-672-8800 ** **