I can not boot my FreeBSD-5.2 partition, please help

[Hanspeter Roth]

  On Jan 16 at 12:30, Juan Rodriguez Hervella spoke:

> Hello,
> 
> I've got a 40 GBytes hard disk on an old Pentium MMX 266 MHz.
> The first time I plugged it into the motherboard my BIOS didn't recognize
> the drive, but fortunately there is a jumper that reduces the size of the
> disk to 32 GBytes, and that's enough for my BIOS at this moment.
> 
> So I've got something like this:
> 
> 10 GBytes for Windows 2000
> 10 GBytes for Linux
> 10 GBytes for FreeBSD-5.2
> 
> The big problem is that the FreeBSD boot manager that I've
> got installed on my MBR is only able to boot the Windows partition.

Hello Juan,

I assume that you have installed all OSes on primary partitions, if
not you should mention it.
FreeBSD's bootmanager has an option `packet' which is required to
boot from cylinder > 1023. Unfortunately it is set off by default.

There are two (or more) possibilities to recover. 

1. install the FreeBSD bootmanager into MBR and Lilo/Grub into the
   Linux partition (/dev/hda2). In order to install the FreeBSD
   bootmanager with the packet option you should boot the FreeBSD
   recovery disk. This is the second disk. And then choose Fixit
   from the install menu. After you have the root prompt issue the
   following command:

   boot0cfg -vB -o packet /dev/ad0

   (This assumes you have a IDE disk.)

2. launch the Linux recovery CD/floppy and setup Lilo or Grub
   accordingly.
   You would need to install it in the MBR (/dev/hda) and create
   entries for Windows and FreeBSD as well.

-Hanspeter