Facing a strange problem with Boot Manager

[Manish Jain]

On 12-Nov-12 02:35, Robert Bonomi wrote:
>> Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2012 22:09:09 +0530
>> From: Manish Jain <bourne.identity at hotmail.com>
>> Subject: Facing a strange problem with Boot Manager
>>
> ....
>>
>> When all installation work finished, FreeBSD would boot when I press F2
>> but pressing F1 would fail to boot XP with the error :
>>
>> "A disk read error occurred. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot"
>>
>> Can anybody suggest what might be the problem and any possible solution ?
>>
>
> No help on a fix.  i'm fighting that exact problem on a FreeBSD 8.3
> install on a 2nd sata drive with xp pro on the 1st drive.  installed
> strictly to the 2nd drive -- would select in bios which to boot from.
>
> booting fbsd works fine.
> attempting to boot th XP drive gives the above error.
>
> Apparently the 8.3 install trashed something on the XP drive.   :((
>
>
>
>

I am using FreeBSD 8.3 too (i386). When XP failed to boot, a wrote out a 
new boot sector to drive C: with recovery console's fixboot command, but 
it did not make a difference. Interestingly, when all seemed lost, I 
even ran fixmbr, which complained that it could not fix much as my 
system seemed "to be using a non-standard MBR".

Never saw this problem before. Has the Boot Manager code/behavior 
changed in 8.X ?

-- 
Regards,

Manish Jain
bourne.identity at hotmail.com