MBR problem
Dan Strick
strick at covad.net
Sat Sep 27 19:19:18 PDT 2003
On Sat, 27 Sep 2003, vitalis at numericable.fr wrote:
> There are 2 partitions on my hard drive, one for FreeBSD and the other
> one for XP. I had to reinstall Windows and of course it blew the MBR up.
> I've reinstalled FreeBSD's boot manager with:
> boot0cfg -B ad0
>
> Now when I boot, the manager lists the 2 OS, but when I choose to boot
> FreeBSD, nothing happens.
>
> Any idea?
>
> #FreeBSD 5.1-CURRENT
>
> bash-2.05b# fdisk ad0
> ******* Working on device /dev/ad0 *******
> parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
> cylinders=232581 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
>
> Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
> parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
> cylinders=232581 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)
>
> Media sector size is 512
> Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
> Information from DOS bootblock is:
> The data for partition 1 is:
> sysid 7 (0x07),(OS/2 HPFS, NTFS, QNX-2 (16 bit) or Advanced UNIX)
> start 63, size 117210177 (57231 Meg), flag 0
> beg: cyl 0/ head 1/ sector 1;
> end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
> The data for partition 2 is:
> sysid 165 (0xa5),(FreeBSD/NetBSD/386BSD)
> start 117210240, size 117226305 (57239 Meg), flag 80 (active)
> beg: cyl 1023/ head 0/ sector 1;
> end: cyl 1023/ head 254/ sector 63
I don't see any smoking guns. I know the basic concept, booting via
an MBR installed with boot0cfg on a FreeBSD 5.1 system with XP in the
first slice works, works. I did it just a couple of days ago.
I do see a potential problem. The boot0 MBR will by default use the
legacy CHS int-13 BIOS services, even if the "extended" services are
available. (At least this is how I read the source code. This is
contrary to at least some of the boot0/boot0cfg documentation.)
Your XP slice is just a teensy bit larger than 1024*255*63 sectors long,
pushing the bootstrap program in your FreeBSD slice just beyond the point
at which it could be successfully loaded with a legacy int-13 disk read.
If possible, do "boot0cfg -v ad0" and see if the "packet" option is set.
If not, see if setting it with "boot0cfg -v -o packet ad0" fixes your
problem. I expect that you are using a modern motherboard whose BIOS
implements the modern "EDDS" int-13 disk functions, perhaps the Asus
P4P800 you just mentioned in a previous posting to freebsd-questions.
Caveat: I have not yet tried the boot0cfg packet option and don't
know for sure that it works. I also wonder how the boot0 program worked
for you before you installed XP. I gather that it did and that suggests
your problem is something else. Still, it is worth a try.
Dan Strick
strick at covad.net
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