Date: Thu, 15 Jun 1995 07:46:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@clark.net> To: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> Cc: jkh@FreeBSD.org, bugs@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: originally a newsgroup post, but news server here isn't working Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.950615074145.17480B-100000@clark.net> In-Reply-To: <199506150630.QAA01865@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
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On Thu, 15 Jun 1995, Bruce Evans wrote: > >At this point I'm a little hesitant to reinstall again from scratch, > >because over this ppp line its about 6 hours a throw, and I've lost my > >dos partition several times so far. Speaking of which, there may be a > >bug in your dos partition handling -- once I rebooted and booted dos, I > >discovered a looped directory pointer -- I have d: mounted to /dos under > >freebsd, and had a /bin directory in it. When I next looked under dos, > >there was a bi directory entry in bi pointing back to bin again. under > > Renaming of directories is quite broken for msdosfs. The following > would create a looped directory: > > cd /dos > mv bin bi # where bin is a dir and bi doesn't exist > > This destroys the "." entry in bin by overwriting it with "bi". Sounds right ;). Nothing norton couldn't fix (or some creative isk editing..). > >At this point, from my point of view, the best possible thing would be > >quick instructions as to how to make the boot manager load onto wd0 so I > >could boot freebsd off of wd1/a. Right now it just goes straight to dos > >booting off of c: (wd0) but if I stick in the boot floppy, boot to the > >boot manager, and tell it wd(1/a) it boots to freebsd fine. So I just > > Er, the program that you tell wd(1,a) too isn't a boot manager. It's just > the FreeBSD boot loader. Once it is loaded, it can boot from any partition > on the first FreeBSD slice on any drive (except DiskManaged hard drives > when the DM software hasn't been loaded by a previous stage in the > bootstrap, e.g., after booting from a FreeBSD floppy). You need a disk > manager on the MBR or on its own partition to load the FreeBSD boot loader > if the FreeBSD slice isn't active. Ok. So here's what I have -- a) no boot manager installed -- for soe reason that didn't happen during sysinstall. b) a bootable freebsd partition, wd(a,1) if anything knew to look there. c) a FreeBSD boot loader on floppy that can be told to point to wd(a,1) So here's my question ;). Is there any post-installation way to get FreeBSD to put in the boot manager, or is that only available from the installation program, which has a nasty tendancy towards overwriting ones root partition entries if run with any decisions made (eg., to install the boot manager, you have to install root.flp, as far as I can see, and that zaps my /etc tree (also on wd(a,1)). I also have a dos partition filling wd0 that I'd like to mount ( > 32 megs dos primary) but freebsd's partition manager says it is unuse, and has a tenency to zap it to actually being unused. Do I need to disklabel the disk? How should I go about mounting it?
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