Restoring FreeBSD grub loader

[Ivan "Rambius" Ivanov]

Hello,

Thank you for your response.

On 10/1/06, backyard <backyard1454-bsd at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> --- "Ivan \"Rambius\" Ivanov"
> <rambiusparkisanius at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I installed FreeBSD 6.1 on one machine with grub
> > boot loader. In the
> > beginning there was only one entry in grub - namely
> > FreeBSD. Later, I
> > had to install Windows XP on the machine and of
> > course, it destroyed
> > grub and now I cannot boot FreeBSD.
> >
> > I tried with booting from the FreeBSD installation
> > disk choosing Fixit
> > option, but I could not use successfully
> > grub-install command.
> >
> > My question is: how can I restore the FreeBSD grub
> > loader? Could you
> > please give me any hints or advance. Thank you very
> > much in advance.
> >
> > Regards
> > Ivan
> >
> > --
>
> I would suggest you make a grub booting floppy disk
> then you can escape to command mode once the disk
> loades and install grub with
>
> root (hd0,0,a)   # or wherever it is
> setup (hd0       # again wherever it is
>
> assuming you have already placed the grub bootfiles on
> your hard drive and configured menu.lst you should be
> all set. I have only encountered one computer this
> method failed.
In fact, I am using a laptop that does not have a floppy drive, so I
could not use booting floppy disks.

>
> you could alternatively flip the kernel tunable that
> allows raw writes to the boot sectors of the disks. I
> don't recall what it is but I think the grub docs talk
> about it in the man or info pages.
>
> I'm supprised XP messed it up, 2000 seemed to respect
> existing bootloaders...
I fixed the problem in the following way: I have another FreeBSD
laptop, so I copied its boot sector using the command

# dd if=/dev/ad0s1a of=/mnt/bootsect.bsd bs=512 count=1

Then I used bootsect.bsd to to boot in FreeBSD via the NT loader (I
found this link useful:
http://www.unixguide.net/freebsd/faq/09.10.shtml). After I boot to
FreeBSD I installed the grub loader.

Regards
Ivan

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