How to boot FreeBSD from a slave IDE disk

rain cip raincip at yahoo.com
Thu Nov 25 20:26:39 PST 2004


Hello, 
 
I hope I can get some help from this list to figure out how to boot FreeBSD from a slave drive.  My PC has two disks.  The sysinstall sees both: ad0 and ad3.  My hardware configuration is such:
 
ad0 -- primary IDE, master  (all for Win2k)
ad3 -- secondary IDE, slave (all for FreeBSD 5.3)
 
No more device on the primary IDE while a CD drive acts as the master on the secondary IDE.
 
I used the entire space on ad3 for a FreeBSD 5.3 release installation while the ad0 contains my old Win 2k.  The problem now is that I can't boot FreeBSD at all even though I had selected "install boot manager" during the installation.  The PC went straight to Win2k every time I booted.  I tried to reboot from the distribution CDROM and used the FDISK utility to make sure that the FreeBSD slice is flagged as "A=" but it did nothing.  In the BIOS setting, I selected the slave drive, i.e. ad3, to be the first boot device, and the ad0 to be second.  Still, I couldn't get to FreeBSD.
 
It appears to me that I did not have the boot manager installed on the ad0.  But when I tried to "install boot manager" onto the ad0, the fdisk gave me no hint where to write the MBR.  Basically what I did was:
 
select "install boot manager"
select "ad0"
hit the "q" key
select "install boot manager"
select "ad3"
hit the "q" key
 
I know I must have done something wrong.  But what did I do wrong?
 
rain

		
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