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

Alex Zbyslaw xfb52 at dial.pipex.com
Tue Sep 13 14:42:57 PDT 2005


Gayn Winters wrote:

>Regarding repair:
>
>Alex (above) seemed to think sysinstall would do it, 
>but I tried a couple times (reloading FreeBSD each time) 
>and gave up.  Given Gary's comments, I suspect that I
>corrupted the disk label on the FreeBSD partition mis-using sysinstall
>somehow.
>
>  
>
Sorry, I didn't follow the whole discussion;  I have no idea how 
sysinstall might handle a corrupted disk label, but I do think that when 
it works, it will do -o packet writing the MBR when it thinks it 
necessary, possibly by default.  I thought you'd said that you'd run 
boot0cfg from a fixit shell, and all I was really suggesting was that -o 
packet would fix your boot selection issue.

>Regarding avoidance:
>I would still like to add additional hard drives to my dual boot
>systems.
>Is there any safe way to do this?
>
Why do you think it's not safe to add hard drives?

My own policy is to have every disk in my system capable of booting 
FreeBSD, some more than once (mostly to allow easy upgrading between 
major revisions, or to allow me to try out 6.X ow whatever), but even a 
disk mostly given over to , say, XP, will have a bit at the end that 
boots BSD.  Doesn't solve everything, but even if one disk goes 
ka-blooey I'll be able to boot something more than a fixit shell (I hope 
:-)).

My new policy is to have a hardcopy of fstab, df and all bsdlabels for 
all partitions... being printed even as this email is being sent :-)

--Alex




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