Booting from DOS?

Joel rees at ddcom.co.jp
Mon May 9 18:50:32 PDT 2005


On Sun, 8 May 2005 16:17:58 -0700
Ron Hudson <ron.hudson at sbcglobal.net> wrote

> FreeBSD-Current said to ask you people.
> >
> > I have just installed 5.3

fbsd_user's post rang a bell. I'm probably going to describe this wrong,
but I'll give it a shot.

> > I have a 100mb dos partition, 70mb swap  and the rest of the 2gb hard 
> > drive as one bsd slice
> >
> > The BSD slice is all one filesystem "/"

I have Fedora Core, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD multi-booting on a sempron box
at home. I ended up using the Fedora Core low-level boot manager, but
that's GRUB now.

GRUB apparently needs to be in the first BIOS-level (fdisk) partition.
But OpenBSD needs its root (disklabel) partition entirely below the 8 GB
boundary. So I cut a smallish BIOS-level partition for Fedora Core's
boot partition, followed that with a largish BIOS-level partition for
OpenBSD, cut a largish BIOS-level partition for the rest of Fedora Core,
and gave the rest of the disk to FreeBSD. 

(I actually have NetBSD booting off a second disk as well, but that
probably isn't relevant.)

It seems a little quirky, because Fedora Core's GRUB puts up its screen,
then, if one of the BSDs is selected, the boot manager for that puts up
its screen.

> > When my system boots it gives:
> >
> > F1 . . . DOS
> > F2 . . . FreeBSD
> >
> > Default F?
> >
> > When I press F1 I get DOS
> >
> > When I press F2 the boot prompt repeats.
> >
> > I have tried to BOOTINST again. The same thing remains.
> >
> > What's wrong?
> >
> > Is there a way to boot BSD from DOS?
> >
> > Thanks for your help.

Not sure I could say what's wrong, but it's possible that the low-level
boot manager may prefer to have a unix style partition to work out of.
Thus, I'll echo fbsd_user's suggestion. 

If that doesn't work, you might try using fdisk to set the active
partition to the one you want to boot from, maybe keeping DOS in the
first BIOS-level partition, but setting the second BIOS-level partition
as the active partition before installing FreeBSD and FreeBSD's boot
manager.

--
Joel Rees   <rees at ddcom.co.jp>
digitcom, inc.   株式会社デジコム
Kobe, Japan   +81-78-672-8800
** <http://www.ddcom.co.jp> **



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