Disk geometry

[Andrew L. Gould]

On Wednesday 24 September 2003 03:09 pm, Sergey "DoubleF" Zaharchenko wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Sep 2003 17:11:49 +0200 "radu.florin" <radu.florin at free.fr> 
probably wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm testing the coexistence of Win95, Linux Slackware and Free BSD 5.1
> > on a single physical disk PC ( P133, 16Mo RAM, 3 GO dd).
> > Just the time to see if I can boot to the OS I want to use.
> > Then to install on a PC with 384 Mo RAM a 40 Go dd
> > On the P133 I'm testing, all is working fine with Win and Slack.
> > Slack boot lets me go to Win or Linux without any problem.
> > I installed also a minimal FreeBSD in good conditions.
> > But I have no access at it...
> > Slack boot don't see it.
> > And if I accept-when installing Free BSD - one of his boots (MBR or SB)
> > I can't have no Win, no Slack, neither FreeBSD. It displays the usual
> > choice F1, F2... but no one works (just screaming).
> > It seems to be a dd geometry problem.
>
> No. It is the BIOS that seems to be the problem. It might be unable to
> do packet interface which is by default required by BootEasy. You could
> try booting from a FreeBSD floppy and running
>
> #boot0cfg -o nopacket /dev/ad0BUGS
>
> (replace ad0 with the harddrive). man 8 boot0cfg for details. It says:
>
> man>     Use of the `packet' option may cause `boot0' to fail, depending on
> the man>     nature of BIOS support.
>
> HTH

I may be way off here, but were the bootable partitions for each operating set 
as bootable in the partitioning section of the installation procedures?

Yesterday, I reinstalled Win2K on a portion of the 1st hard drive of my 
desktop.  (FreeBSD is on the 2nd hard drive.) I then executed 
/stand/sysinstall in FreeBSD to mark the Win2K partition as bootable and load 
the FreeBSD boot loader into the MBR.  Later, I installed NetBSD on the last 
part of the 1st hard drive, leaving the MBR alone during NetBSD installation.

When I rebooted, the FreeBSD boot loader showed the partitions for each 
operating system; but would only boot Win2K and FreeBSD.  I had to go back to 
/stand/sysinstall in FreeBSD to mark the NetBSD partition as bootable.  Now I 
can boot all 3 operating systems (one at a time, of course!) .

Best of luck,

Andrew Gould