sysinstall and bsdlabel/boot

[Nikola Lečić]

On Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:57:49 -0800
"Nerius Landys" <nlandys at gmail.com> wrote:
 
> I was trying to install 7.0RC1 (hope it's OK to post this here,
> because I believe that older versions of FreeBSD have this same
> limitation) and came across a gotcha.  I had an MBR on disk that I
> wanted to keep.  It was Lilo and all it did was boot a selected
> slice, it was configured to function the same as FreeBSD's `boot0'.
> So, the install of FreeBSD came to the area where it asks what to do
> with the MBR.  There are three choices: 1) boot manager, 2) simple
> MBR, and 3) do nothing.  I chose to do nothing because I wanted to
> keep Lilo in the MBR.  But, by choosing this option, I expected
> sysinstall to install the /boot/boot code to the beginning of the
> FreeBSD slice.  Well, no such boot code was installed, apparently,
> unless I totally missed something.  Basically, after the install,
> when I delegated Lilo to boot the chosen [FreeBSD] slice, it did not
> find any boot code on that slice.

Have you configured lilo properly? In the past, I used to use something
like this:

other=/dev/hda2
        table=/dev/hda
        loader=/boot/chain.b
        label=FreeBSD

(Actually, you can delete "loader=/boot/chain.b" since FreeBSD and
Linux share the same disk in your case -- and I assume you use lilo to
dual-boot Linux and FreeBSD.)

> My workaround for this was to choose option 1) boot manager.  I ended
> up using boot0 (the boot manager) which I feel is superior to Lilo
> because it is more modular, simpler.  However, some users may not
> want this.  I didn't find any option in sysinstall to install just
> the /boot/boot code to the beginning of the FreeBSD slice.  Am I
> missing something?

You don't have to go through sysinstall. Just for the case, reinstall
bootstrap code of your FreeBSD slice (say, ad0s1):

  # bsdlabel -B /dev/ad0s1

(the code will come from /boot/boot by default), and then reinstall
lilo from Linux, with the aforementioned configuration.

Best regards.
-- 
Nikola Lečić :: Никола Лечић