Problems trying to boot from an 80GB

[Mark Terribile]

Sean and Andrew,

I'm no expert, but two things strike me as odd.
Perhaps some greater Guru can tell us whether or not
they represent a problem.

>> I'm trying to get my first FreeBSD (4.8-RELEASE)
>> installation working, ...

>> Next, I created a NTFS partition on the drive
>> with an XP install CD,  ...
>> Out of other ideas, I resorted to "Dangerous 
>> Dedicated", which ... gave a different error:
>>                  No /boot/loader
>> Default: 0:ad(0,a)/kernel boot:
>>           No /kernel

As I understand it (and check the man page for
boot(8)) the MBR boot record has to pull a larger
boot program from the partition or slice (?) which
pulls in a Forth interpreter and a Forth program.
It is this loader which gives you the initial
messages about `8 seconds to boot' and allows you
to interrupt it, chose another kernel file, set
sysctl variables, etc.

This loader has to be able to read the root directory
on the file system.

I see two possible problems.  First, the loader has
to know how to read the root directory and find the
blocks of the file.  Can it do this if the file
system is an NTFS file system?  (I understand  NTFS
to mean one of the Windows FS types.)  Second, if
you use the Dangerously Dedicated structure, with no
FreeBSD slice table, is there a place for the second
stage boot block and the boot loader to be stored?

                                        Mark Terribile

 ----------------------------------------------------

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by
turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke
sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just
power-cycling it with no understanding of what is
going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.
                   From _The New Hacker's Dictionary_,
                   at http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon,
                   maintained by Eric S. Raymond



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