Installed 5.2RC from CDROM, fails to boot in manager

[Doug White]

On Thu, 1 Jan 2004, Clint Olsen wrote:

> On Jan 01, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> >
> > Try re-writing the MBR. Use the fixit disk (ISO-2) to bring up th live
> > system. Then enter the command: boot0cfg -o packet -B ad0
> >
> > There are other options you might want to use, but this should work.
> > (Read the man page.)
>
> Thanks for the suggestion.  Incidentally, I did finally get the darn system
> to boot, but I had to allow fdisk to determine the slices itself.  I
> checked my old 4.7 machine, and apparently I didn't pay much attention, but
> it also made 2 unused slices at each ends of the disk with the FreeBSD
> slice in the middle.  I'd sure like to know why the blank slice is required
> at the end of the disk...

Cylinder alignment.

FreeBSD's fdisk has always had a heck of a time getting disk geometry to
jive with the BIOS.  The best way to avoid this sort of problem is to
write the initial partition table with DOS FDISK by creating a dos
partition that you delete in FreeBSD later.  Since DOS FDISK is using BIOS
vectors to figure out geometry and such, it get it right as far as the
BIOS is concerned and thats what matters to boot0.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org