Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 22:30:30 -0400 (EDT) From: Doug Denault <doug@safeport.com> To: "Anders Chr. Skoe" <skoe@owlnet.rice.edu> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Anyone resolved "Missing operating system" issue? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.1000711221143.41776A-100000@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0007111029390.4577-100000@jungle.owlnet.rice.edu>
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I encountered the same characteristics installing 3.3 and 4.0 on two different Dell Latitude notebooks trying the FreeBSD only setup. It appeared that the install went fine, lots of "writing this" messages. The system just would not boot. It seemed that no boot record was installed. In this path if you run sysinstall the "w" option does not appear on the menu where you set the disk parms and each time when I boot from the floppies there was partition was not marked bootable. In consulting with a FreeBSD "veteran", we reached the conclusion this option just did not work (at least on this system). In our case, installing with an FDISK partition leaving something as non unix worked perfectly. We never put anything in the partition, just let the install program allocate it. I was pondering turning this in as a bug, but never got around to it. Your (a) case seems to be exactly my experience. In the (b) case have you tried booting from the install CD/floppies and setting the partition bootable and rewriting the boot record using sysinstall? That worked for me using 3.3 and 4.0 (the CDs I happened to have). In my case disk geometry was not an issue, as long as I used an DOS partition table. On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, Anders Chr. Skoe wrote: > Howdy, folks! > > unfortunately, this email follows a pretty good history of posts regarding > the "Missing operating system" error. we install 3.2 with no problems on > our western digital WDE4360-1807A3, but it just won't boot. our bios is > the adaptec AHA 2940 Ultra/Ultra W BIOS v1.23. > > a) if we only create a freebsd partition, and try to boot it, we get the > infamous "Missing operating system" error. > > b) if we create both dos & freebsd partitions, we get to the boot manager, > but selecting freebsd doesn't work. we've tried putting the freebsd > partition first as well as the dos partition first, but it makes no > difference. we've also tried various combinations of partition sizes. > > c) setting the drive geometry to 4095/64/32 doesn't help (someone > suggested this in an earlier mail). > > d) using FDISK we've set the active partition to the freebsd > partition. it doesn't help. > > e) we can boot from the floppy & cdrom drives. > > we would really appreciate some useful feedback 'cause it's drivin' us > crazy. > > a & j > > > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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