Fixing a MBR (and more) that ??? trashed

Gary W. Swearingen garys at opusnet.com
Tue Sep 13 08:01:39 PDT 2005


"Gayn Winters" <gayn.winters at bristolsystems.com> writes:

> 1.  What did/do I need to do to completely fix the Master Boot Record?
> (Short of reinstalling FreeBSD!)

I like what the other guy said about "-o packet".

> 2.  Was the disk label on the FreeBSD slice ad1s2 really corrupted?  If

Unlikely, at least until you ran sysinstall.  I've never figured out
how it handles existing disklabels.  Badly, in my limited experience.
Use "bsdlabel" from a rescue CD and see what you have there.  If
you're concered about the mount points, mount the "/" device and look
in /etc/fstab.

> 3.  I couldn't get sysinstall to fix this mess - even though I thought
> it was fixing the FreeBSD partition mount points and applying a new BSD
> Boot Manager.  I couldn't get these "fixes" to "commit".  Can sysinstall
> fix this mess without reinstalling?

I'd use a rescue system -- either CD or another hard disk.

> 4.  How do I avoid this situation when I add another disk? (Other than
> trash the w2k partition.)

I don't know about dual-booting MSFT, but you could "dd" the first
tracks of the HDD and it's primary partitions to files on a formatted
floppy or two for safe-keeping, before doing anything that could mess
up the boot records.  You might want to save the first track of your
FreeBSD primary partition too.  You can then put them (or selected
sectors) back with "dd" from most unixy rescue OSes.


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list