Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 12:57:11 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Doug Denault <doug@safeport.com> Cc: "Anders Chr. Skoe" <skoe@owlnet.rice.edu>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Anyone resolved "Missing operating system" issue? Message-ID: <20000712125711.M30262@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.1000711221143.41776A-100000@fledge.watson.org> References: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0007111029390.4577-100000@jungle.owlnet.rice.edu> <Pine.BSF.3.96.1000711221143.41776A-100000@fledge.watson.org>
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On Tuesday, 11 July 2000 at 22:30:30 -0400, Doug Denault wrote: > 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. > > 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 my case disk geometry was not an issue, as long as I used an DOS > partition table. Which model was this? I've never had trouble installing on Latitudes. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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