Re: problems with sysinstall

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Sergey Matveychuk wrote:

> The first one: when I install -current on disk where WinXP on first
> slice, sysinstall brakes WinXP boot complete. I got 'Missing operation
> system' everytime. Even I've tried 'fixboot' and reinstall WinXP.
> Helps only 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 count=100' and reinstall WinXP
> on clean disk.

I don't know how WinXP's bootblocks are set up, but I have this setup on
Win2k and it works as expected with boot0.  It sounds like the active
partition bit got misplaced, though.  Blowing away the whole thing was a
bit extreme.

"Missing operating system" comes out of the DOS default bootblock, not the
BIOS.

> When I've installed first -current on first slice and second -current on
> second slice I got booting only first one. I use grub and either I set
> root(hd1,0) or root(hd1,1) (yes, it's a second disk) and 'chainloader
> +1' and 'boot' I've got always first -current boot. Looks like problem
> with boot sector where hardcoded booting from first slice (?).

Don't use chainloader with FreeBSD.  Use 'kernel /boot/loader' instead.
This is documented in the GRUB info doc. Again, I have set this exact
system up with redhat on the first disk and it works perfectly.

> The second: when I've tried to save results from Fdisk or Label menu
> I've got the message: 'ERROR: Unable to write data to disk ad0!'
> Why? I can change slices and partitions only when I boot from CD-ROM.

This is normal and for your protection. you can't edit the disk you're
running off of.  If you are running off of ad1, make sure 1) you're root
when you run sysinstall and b) you aren't mounting any filesystems from
ad0.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite_at_gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org