5.3-beta3 boot manger show stopper problem

[Mark]

On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 02:58:02PM -0400, fbsd_user wrote:
>    MS/Windows98 is first partition with 30% of 10 gig IDE hard
> drive. This booted and worked as expected. Downloaded 5.3-beta3
> miniinstall.iso using my Freebsd server box, ran md5 and verified
> correct hash with checksum.md5 file. Burned to cdrom and installed
> 5.3 as second system on MS/Windows98 box with Freebsd default boot
> manager. Freebsd install went fine. On first reboot tried to load
> MS/Windows98. After F1 key win98 boot just hung there doing nothing.
> Did pc reset and boot started again, this time selected F3 key for
> 5.3 boot which just hung there doing nothing.
> 
> Now hard drive is unusable. PC boot using MS/Windows98 floppy to get
> to native DOS prompt and ran fdisk which shows win98 and freebsd
> allocated as expected.
> This also happened with 5.3-beta1 and had to DOS fdisk HD to single
> partition and format c: before was able to reinstall win98 from
> cdrom. fdisk /mbr did not help.
> 
> Just to test equipment I then installed 4.10 as second system with
> default Freebsd boot manager and every thing worked as expected.
> 
> 5.3 install from downloaded iso image has show stopper problem using
> default boot manger.
> 
> Anybody reading this post from the 5.3 release build team have any
> ideas on how to recover both systems on HD without blanking out HD
> like before?
> 

 I had something like this happen a few times from my mistakes and
 found that gag bootloader will install and  boot or "recover" both os.