From owner-freebsd-questions  Wed Aug  7 22:38:16 1996
Return-Path: owner-questions
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id WAA09767
          for questions-outgoing; Wed, 7 Aug 1996 22:38:16 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from gdi.uoregon.edu (cisco-ts6-line14.uoregon.edu [128.223.150.44])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id WAA09740
          for <questions@freebsd.org>; Wed, 7 Aug 1996 22:38:08 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from localhost (dwhite@localhost) by gdi.uoregon.edu (8.7.5/8.6.12) with SMTP id WAA00423; Wed, 7 Aug 1996 22:37:50 -0700 (PDT)
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 22:37:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu>
Reply-To: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu
To: "Jeffrey M. Metcalf" <jeffrey_m._metcalf@ccmail.bms.com>
cc: questions@freebsd.org, metcalf@imagine.com,
        joseph_m._o'connor@ccgate1.bms.com
Subject: Re: Repair boot sector of IDE hard drive
In-Reply-To: <9607078394.AA839454178@ccgate0.bms.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.94.960807223613.216W-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

On Wed, 7 Aug 1996, Jeffrey M. Metcalf wrote:

>      In preparing an installation of FreeBSD 2.1, a collegue of mine and I
>      used DOS fdisk to partition an IDE hard drive and through one process
>      or another, managed to corrupt the boot sector.  We do not have a 
>      backup of the boot sector and would like to know if there is a way
>      to repair it.  We know the geometry of the hard drive.  It is a 
>      1272MB hard drive with a geometry of 2466 cyls, 16 heads, and 
>      63 sectors.  Currently, DOS fdisk reports that the maximum size
>      of the hard drive available for a primary DOS partition is
>      504MB, when this is clearly not the case.  We want to correct the
>      boot sector so that DOS fdisk will recognize the 1272MB as the 
>      maximum available size for a primary DOS partition.

You need to get a sector translator, which is available from your disk
manufacturer or local computer shop.  A product that does this is
OnTrack's "Disk Manager".

In the future, do _NOT_ install the boot manager if you have such a
translator installed (which you probably did and erased when you installed
the boot manager).  

Doug White                              | University of Oregon  
Internet:  dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu    | Residence Networking Assistant
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite    | Computer Science Major