Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2011 02:01:51 -0500 From: "Conrad J. Sabatier" <conrads@cox.net> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 8.2-RELEASE-amd64.iso weirdness (help!) Message-ID: <20110803020151.44ac6ada@serene> In-Reply-To: <j1amge$dnq$1@dough.gmane.org> References: <20110802180606.4599d800@serene> <j1amge$dnq$1@dough.gmane.org>
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On Wed, 03 Aug 2011 01:35:30 -0400, Michael Powell <nightrecon@hotmail.com> wrote: >Conrad J. Sabatier wrote: ... >> Worse still, though, is what I ran across in the >> partitioning/labeling/boot record section of sysinstall; no more >> "dangerously dedicated" mode (unless you go into "expert" mode, which >> is rather a mystery to me), and worse yet, it seems that the options >> to install a plain master boot record or boot manager have no effect >> whatsoever! > >"Dangerously dedicated" is being deprecated in favor of more modern >ways and methods to slice and partition. You should no longer seek to >utilize it, and I think, if memory serves there was some talk at one >time on removing it from fdisk and/or sysinstall. Well, in 8.2, it *has* been removed essentially. The only way to try to effect a DD partitioning is to go into the mysterious and error-prone "expert" mode, as it's no longer provided as an option in the partitioning menu. ... >> The really crucial problem I'm facing right now is that I can't get >> Linux's damned "grub" off of my hard drive! ... >Sounds like you need to zero the first part of your drive. The >following is best done before installing, rather than afterwards. >Either boot a LiveFS CD (which I have done before) or, I believe this >is also possible from the Fixit shell (which I have not tried). In >order to gain the ability to "force" writes to this area do this at a >root prompt: > >sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 > >then to zero out the beginning of your disk do: > >dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 > >where x is the drive number. This should get the grub gone. Then >install as normal. With the grub MBR out of the way you should now be >able to install FreeBSD bootloader/MBR as you have in the past. I have already tried using dd to zero out the beginning of the drive, just the MBR sector at first, then later even up to a full gigabyte, but grub is still there. I didn't, however, set that sysctl first. Is that why dd didn't work? I'm not familiar with that particular setting. I still don't understand, though, why sysinstall's option to install the MBR didn't do the trick. Neither the boot manager nor the plain-vanilla MBR installation seemed to have any effect at all. Weird. Anyway, thanks for the advice. I'll keep trying. I am determined to get back to my beloved FreeBSD, which I had been using since 1996, until this unfortunate situation occurred with my newly acquired machine's (not so new anymore) hard drive and CD-ROM not being recognized during attempts to install. Will post back later on the results. I just hate to have to keep trashing and then reinstalling Linux, just to get back online so I can get more information about this seriously annoying problem. :-) Stay tuned! :-) -- Conrad J. Sabatier conrads@cox.net
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