[Fwd: Failure to boot from HD formatted not by FreeBSD]

[Andrew Lankford]

I mentioned that I've set up my laptop to boot using the Windows Vista 
boot menu.  I have, and I needed to copy /boot/boot1 from 7-stable to my 
NTFS partition in order to successfully boot  to my FreeBSD 8.0 
partition.  Last night, I tried replacing the 7-stable boot1 block with 
a version from 8.0-RC1, and now it doesn't successfully boot.  I gather 
from the 8.0 release notes that there have been some changes to some 
part of the boot code.  In any case, I can boot via the Windows boot 
menu with the help of 7-stable's /boot/boot1 file.

Hoping that helps ....

Andrew Lankford

-------- Original Message --------
From: 	- Thu Oct 22 20:54:06 2009
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Date: 	Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:53:57 -0400
From: 	Andrew Lankford <lankfordandrew at charter.net>
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To: 	Yuri <yuri at rawbw.com>, freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org
Subject: 	Failure to boot from HD formatted not by FreeBSD
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Looks to me like you're trying to get your computer to dual-boot Vista 
and FreeBSD 8.0, something I finally succeeded in doing.  If by "MBR" 
you mean the first-stage boot program (512 bytes), I couldn't get that 
to work, nor could I use the standard boot0 menu from FreeBSD.  I'm 
using the windows boot program instead.  I think what I did was copy 
"/boot/boot1" from my root partition to my NTFS partition and then added 
an option to the Windows boot menu to boot with it. 

I get the GEOM "track boundary" complaint when I boot up as well.   The 
FBSD 8.0 kernel has a new option 'GEOM_PART_MBR" on by default.   Vista 
insisted on partitioning my drive, so if the new partition handler 
doesn't like it, it can lump it.  In order to get the 8.0 kernel to 
recognise your old partitions, you need the "GEOM_MBR" option 
activated.  That means you need to load "geom_mbr.ko" into memory before 
you load and boot from the 8.0 kernel.  If you're booting from a FreeBSD 
8.0 CD directly into sysinstall, you can escape to a shell and kldload 
geom_mbr.ko, but you have to then restart sysinstall without rebooting 
the computer in order for your hard disk partitions to show up.  The 
only reliable way I could find to restart systinstall without rebooting 
was by pressing the power button.  Wierd, eh?  I added "option GEOM_MBR" 
back into my kernel, recompiled, fiddled with my network settings, and 
now everything seems to work alright.

Anyway, all this procedure should be 75% correct since I've managed to 
successfully upgrade to 8.0 from 7-stable this way.  For all I know, I 
might end up with a corrupted partition six months from now.  Either 
that or Marcel Moolenar will get angry at me.

Regards,

Andrew Lankford