Re: Hosed my MBR?
On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 01:27:03PM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote: On Tue, April 11, 2006 09:08, Jerry McAllister wrote: I'm in a bit of a mess here. I've got an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard with two on-board SATA RAID controllers, an Intel MatrixRAID (ICH5R) and Promise Fasttrak (PDC20378). My BIOS allows me to boot from either the Promise or the Intel controller. Well, the install CD is also the fixit CD. You can try booting from it and choosing the shell and then trying to run the fdisk from that environment to replace the MBR. I have done that for people who have hosed their MBR on machines with Ghost - even their XP only, no FreeBSD, systems, using the FreeBSD fixit, I ran fdisk and replaced the MBR with the FreeBSD MBR and it worked just fine. Hi Jerry, I think the root of my confusion here is the fact that I have two RAID controllers and can boot off either controller. Does that mean I have two MBR's, one for each controller? If that's the case and I boot off a CD-ROM, which MBR am I fixing? Are both controllers part of the same raid device? no, as I said in my OP, each controller hosts a RAID1. The Intel has two disks for Win, and the FastTrak has two disks dedicated to FreeBSD. Anyway, there needs to be an MBR on each bootable device as well as the boot files. I think that holds true for raid setups as well. In addition, the first bootable device that your BIOS sees must have an MBR regardless of whether you have 1 or more bootable devices. In your case, it sounds like you have two raid devices, one on each controller. You would have to have an MBR on each and it sounds like you think you wiped the one on the INTEL controller. Figure out what device name the raid on the INTEL controller comes up as and then write the MBR to that. Thanks for your response. My follow-up question to you is how would running a FBSD fdisk command on the Intel controller fix a hosed WinXP MBR? Or is an MBR OS agnostic? -- Regards, Doug ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hosed my MBR?
On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 01:27:03PM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote: On Tue, April 11, 2006 09:08, Jerry McAllister wrote: I'm in a bit of a mess here. I've got an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard with two on-board SATA RAID controllers, an Intel MatrixRAID (ICH5R) and Promise Fasttrak (PDC20378). My BIOS allows me to boot from either the Promise or the Intel controller. Well, the install CD is also the fixit CD. You can try booting from it and choosing the shell and then trying to run the fdisk from that environment to replace the MBR. I have done that for people who have hosed their MBR on machines with Ghost - even their XP only, no FreeBSD, systems, using the FreeBSD fixit, I ran fdisk and replaced the MBR with the FreeBSD MBR and it worked just fine. Hi Jerry, I think the root of my confusion here is the fact that I have two RAID controllers and can boot off either controller. Does that mean I have two MBR's, one for each controller? If that's the case and I boot off a CD-ROM, which MBR am I fixing? Are both controllers part of the same raid device? no, as I said in my OP, each controller hosts a RAID1. The Intel has two disks for Win, and the FastTrak has two disks dedicated to FreeBSD. Anyway, there needs to be an MBR on each bootable device as well as the boot files. I think that holds true for raid setups as well. In addition, the first bootable device that your BIOS sees must have an MBR regardless of whether you have 1 or more bootable devices. In your case, it sounds like you have two raid devices, one on each controller. You would have to have an MBR on each and it sounds like you think you wiped the one on the INTEL controller. Figure out what device name the raid on the INTEL controller comes up as and then write the MBR to that. Thanks for your response. My follow-up question to you is how would running a FBSD fdisk command on the Intel controller fix a hosed WinXP MBR? Or is an MBR OS agnostic? Well, the FreeBSD MBR is. I have used a FreeBSD MBR to fix a hosed MBR (hosed by Ghost) on an XP only (eg. no FreeBSD on it) machine and it worked fine. I suspect it might not work in the reverse direction, though. The MS MBR is not known for playing nice with other OS boot sectors. I don't know what the difference it. Is there some other disk and [preferrably SCSI] controller you can stick in and install FreeBSD on and try to mount and check out the raid that you think is hosed before doing anything irreversable? I forgot if you said you had tried looking at it with a fixit disk but that might work if the raid is hardware raid. jerry -- Regards, Doug ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hosed my MBR?
On Fri, Apr 14, 2006 at 11:51:58AM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote: In your case, it sounds like you have two raid devices, one on each controller. You would have to have an MBR on each and it sounds like you think you wiped the one on the INTEL controller. Figure out what device name the raid on the INTEL controller comes up as and then write the MBR to that. Thanks for your response. My follow-up question to you is how would running a FBSD fdisk command on the Intel controller fix a hosed WinXP MBR? Or is an MBR OS agnostic? Well, the FreeBSD MBR is. I have used a FreeBSD MBR to fix a hosed MBR (hosed by Ghost) on an XP only (eg. no FreeBSD on it) machine and it worked fine. really? I suspect it was sysinstall's fdisk that hosed my MBR on the Intel controller in the first place. Cause now it brings up a broken FreeBSD boot loader instead of the WinXP loader. I suspect it might not work in the reverse direction, though. The MS MBR is not known for playing nice with other OS boot sectors. I don't know what the difference it. hmmm... Is there some other disk and [preferrably SCSI] controller you can stick in and install FreeBSD on and try to mount and check out the raid that you think is hosed before doing anything irreversable? I forgot if you said you had tried looking at it with a fixit disk but that might work if the raid is hardware raid. I can still boot FreeBSD off my FastTrack controller (ar0), that's where I'm writing this email from. I can see both the Intel RAID device (ar1), and mount the data from NTFS (ar1s1), and newly created UFS-2 (ar1s2). I even did a dd of the MBR from ar0 and ar1 and compared the two. Of course, I don't know what I'm looking at so that didn't go too far :) -- Regards, Doug ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hosed my MBR?
On Fri, Apr 14, 2006 at 11:51:58AM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote: In your case, it sounds like you have two raid devices, one on each controller. You would have to have an MBR on each and it sounds like you think you wiped the one on the INTEL controller. Figure out what device name the raid on the INTEL controller comes up as and then write the MBR to that. Thanks for your response. My follow-up question to you is how would running a FBSD fdisk command on the Intel controller fix a hosed WinXP MBR? Or is an MBR OS agnostic? Well, the FreeBSD MBR is. I have used a FreeBSD MBR to fix a hosed MBR (hosed by Ghost) on an XP only (eg. no FreeBSD on it) machine and it worked fine. really? I suspect it was sysinstall's fdisk that hosed my MBR on the Intel controller in the first place. Cause now it brings up a broken FreeBSD boot loader instead of the WinXP loader. I suspect it might not work in the reverse direction, though. The MS MBR is not known for playing nice with other OS boot sectors. I don't know what the difference it. hmmm... Is there some other disk and [preferrably SCSI] controller you can stick in and install FreeBSD on and try to mount and check out the raid that you think is hosed before doing anything irreversable? I forgot if you said you had tried looking at it with a fixit disk but that might work if the raid is hardware raid. I can still boot FreeBSD off my FastTrack controller (ar0), that's where I'm writing this email from. I can see both the Intel RAID device (ar1), and mount the data from NTFS (ar1s1), and newly created UFS-2 (ar1s2). I even did a dd of the MBR from ar0 and ar1 and compared the two. Of course, I don't know what I'm looking at so that didn't go too far :) This has lasted long enough that I am forgetting parts, such as it is the MS piece that doesn't boot, not the FreeBSD. But, if you get a FreeBSD boot loader, then it is not the MBR that is hosed, but the boot sector itself. Probably bsdlabel wrote on it and not fdisk. That could be a little more difficult, since those boot sectors can be quite different and are not OS agnostic. In this case, your best bet may be to mount the MS file system from the FreeBSD side and copy it somewhere for safety and then try to rebuild the MS system from scratch. Note, I said 'may' be. If someone was to raise an argument, I would fall over easily. But, you should still be able to mount the MS file slice and read it from the FreeBSD side and use that to check it and squirrel it away somewhere. Here is an fstab entry I use on this machine to mount my MS-XP slice as /mydos: /dev/ad0s2 /mydos msdos rw 0 0 It happens to be FAT, but there is one for NTFS as well. But, last I checked, FreeBSD can read, but not write NTFS, just FATs. jerry -- Regards, Doug ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hosed my MBR?
On Fri, Apr 14, 2006 at 12:49:50PM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote: I can still boot FreeBSD off my FastTrack controller (ar0), that's where I'm writing this email from. I can see both the Intel RAID device (ar1), and mount the data from NTFS (ar1s1), and newly created UFS-2 (ar1s2). I even did a dd of the MBR from ar0 and ar1 and compared the two. Of course, I don't know what I'm looking at so that didn't go too far :) This has lasted long enough that I am forgetting parts, such as it is the MS piece that doesn't boot, not the FreeBSD. But, if you get a FreeBSD boot loader, then it is not the MBR that is hosed, but the boot sector itself. Probably bsdlabel wrote on it and not fdisk. That could be a little more difficult, since those boot sectors can be quite different and are not OS agnostic. That makes sense. In this case, your best bet may be to mount the MS file system from the FreeBSD side and copy it somewhere for safety and then try to rebuild the MS system from scratch. Note, I said 'may' be. If someone was to raise an argument, I would fall over easily. A WinXP re-install was always my last resort. I was hoping for something quicker. Data recovery isn't an issue as all my important data is kept on a file server. Thanks for your help. -- Regards, Doug ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hosed my MBR?
Hello, I'm in a bit of a mess here. I've got an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard with two on-board SATA RAID controllers, an Intel MatrixRAID (ICH5R) and Promise Fasttrak (PDC20378). My BIOS allows me to boot from either the Promise or the Intel controller. The PDC20378 runs two drives in a RAID0 configuration booting FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE. The entire drive (ar0) is dedicated to FreeBSD and I have the boot-manager installed. The ICH5R also runs two drives in a RAID0 for Windows XP. I allocated roughly 25% of the drive (ar1) to Windows NTFS (ar1s1) and left the remaining disk open. Now that 6.x supports the ICH5R I decided to use the leftover disk (ar1) for a FreeBSD slice. I used sysinstall's fdisk to create the slice in the unused portion of the disk. I successfully committed the changes. I then used # newfs /dev/ar1s2 to create a file-system and it went fine. The problem is, now, when I attempt to boot off the Intel controller, I get a FreeBSD boot load failure: --- Invalid Partition Invalid Partition No /boot/loader FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: Invalid partition No /boot/kernel/kernel FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: --- So it would seem I hosed my MBR. The question is, how did I do it and how do I fix it? I would think that when I choose to leave the MBR untouched in sysinstall, that it would do just that. I cannot use the old DOS boot floppy trick of: fdisk /MBR as DOS will not recognize my Intel controller. Windows installation media is equally clueless. I want to be very careful here so as not to render my entire system useless. A thought occurred to me that I might be able to get a MBR from another Windows box freesbie# dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/mnt/nfs/tmp/XP.mbr bs=512 count=79 hosedbox# dd if=/mnt/nfs/tmp/XP.mbr of=/dev/ar1 bs=512 count=79 and write that over my bad MBR. Does that make sense? Is there a better way? Well, the install CD is also the fixit CD. You can try booting from it and choosing the shell and then trying to run the fdisk from that environment to replace the MBR. I have done that for people who have hosed their MBR on machines with Ghost - even their XP only, no FreeBSD, systems, using the FreeBSD fixit, I ran fdisk and replaced the MBR with the FreeBSD MBR and it worked just fine. Now, if that is not really the problem, of course that won't fix anything. But it shouldn't hurt either. And you could really mess things up with the dd. Good luck, jerry -- Regards, Doug ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hosed my MBR?
On Tue, April 11, 2006 09:08, Jerry McAllister wrote: I'm in a bit of a mess here. I've got an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard with two on-board SATA RAID controllers, an Intel MatrixRAID (ICH5R) and Promise Fasttrak (PDC20378). My BIOS allows me to boot from either the Promise or the Intel controller. Well, the install CD is also the fixit CD. You can try booting from it and choosing the shell and then trying to run the fdisk from that environment to replace the MBR. I have done that for people who have hosed their MBR on machines with Ghost - even their XP only, no FreeBSD, systems, using the FreeBSD fixit, I ran fdisk and replaced the MBR with the FreeBSD MBR and it worked just fine. Hi Jerry, I think the root of my confusion here is the fact that I have two RAID controllers and can boot off either controller. Does that mean I have two MBR's, one for each controller? If that's the case and I boot off a CD-ROM, which MBR am I fixing? -- Regards, Doug ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hosed my MBR?
On Tue, April 11, 2006 09:08, Jerry McAllister wrote: I'm in a bit of a mess here. I've got an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard with two on-board SATA RAID controllers, an Intel MatrixRAID (ICH5R) and Promise Fasttrak (PDC20378). My BIOS allows me to boot from either the Promise or the Intel controller. Well, the install CD is also the fixit CD. You can try booting from it and choosing the shell and then trying to run the fdisk from that environment to replace the MBR. I have done that for people who have hosed their MBR on machines with Ghost - even their XP only, no FreeBSD, systems, using the FreeBSD fixit, I ran fdisk and replaced the MBR with the FreeBSD MBR and it worked just fine. Hi Jerry, I think the root of my confusion here is the fact that I have two RAID controllers and can boot off either controller. Does that mean I have two MBR's, one for each controller? If that's the case and I boot off a CD-ROM, which MBR am I fixing? Are both controllers part of the same raid device? say you have some disk on one and others on the other and they are all lumped in to the same raid device?I don't even know if you can do that as I haven't tried or looked at it. But, it goes by the address you use in the fdisk command. I don't know if it being raid messes things up or not. Any time I have done anything with raid, I had a separate boot and system device outside of the raid. The raid was lumping together disks to make a larger work data storage. Anyway, there needs to be an MBR on each bootable device as well as the boot files. I think that holds true for raid setups as well. In addition, the first bootable device that your BIOS sees must have an MBR regardless of whether you have 1 or more bootable devices. In your case, it sounds like you have two raid devices, one on each controller. You would have to have an MBR on each and it sounds like you think you wiped the one on the INTEL controller. Figure out what device name the raid on the INTEL controller comes up as and then write the MBR to that. jerry -- Regards, Doug ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hosed my MBR?
Boot off the WinXP disc enter the repair utility (console). You can type 'help' for all the commands. There's a command called fixmbr; I think this is what you are looking for. On 4/10/06, Doug Poland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, I'm in a bit of a mess here. I've got an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard with two on-board SATA RAID controllers, an Intel MatrixRAID (ICH5R) and Promise Fasttrak (PDC20378). My BIOS allows me to boot from either the Promise or the Intel controller. The PDC20378 runs two drives in a RAID0 configuration booting FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE. The entire drive (ar0) is dedicated to FreeBSD and I have the boot-manager installed. The ICH5R also runs two drives in a RAID0 for Windows XP. I allocated roughly 25% of the drive (ar1) to Windows NTFS (ar1s1) and left the remaining disk open. Now that 6.x supports the ICH5R I decided to use the leftover disk (ar1) for a FreeBSD slice. I used sysinstall's fdisk to create the slice in the unused portion of the disk. I successfully committed the changes. I then used # newfs /dev/ar1s2 to create a file-system and it went fine. The problem is, now, when I attempt to boot off the Intel controller, I get a FreeBSD boot load failure: --- Invalid Partition Invalid Partition No /boot/loader FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: Invalid partition No /boot/kernel/kernel FreeBSD/i386 boot Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/kernel/kernel boot: --- So it would seem I hosed my MBR. The question is, how did I do it and how do I fix it? I would think that when I choose to leave the MBR untouched in sysinstall, that it would do just that. I cannot use the old DOS boot floppy trick of: fdisk /MBR as DOS will not recognize my Intel controller. Windows installation media is equally clueless. I want to be very careful here so as not to render my entire system useless. A thought occurred to me that I might be able to get a MBR from another Windows box freesbie# dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/mnt/nfs/tmp/XP.mbr bs=512 count=79 hosedbox# dd if=/mnt/nfs/tmp/XP.mbr of=/dev/ar1 bs=512 count=79 and write that over my bad MBR. Does that make sense? Is there a better way? -- Regards, Doug ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Hosed my MBR?
On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 08:06:11PM -0400, Huy Ton That wrote: On 4/10/06, Doug Poland [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, I'm in a bit of a mess here. I've got an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard with two on-board SATA RAID controllers, an Intel MatrixRAID (ICH5R) and Promise Fasttrak (PDC20378). My BIOS allows me to boot from either the Promise or the Intel controller. ... The problem is, now, when I attempt to boot off the Intel controller, I get a FreeBSD boot load failure: Invalid Partition Invalid Partition So it would seem I hosed my MBR. The question is, how did I do it and how do I fix it? I would think that when I choose to leave the MBR untouched in sysinstall, that it would do just that. I cannot use the old DOS boot floppy trick of: fdisk /MBR as DOS will not recognize my Intel controller. Windows installation media is equally clueless. I want to be very careful here so as not to render my entire system useless. A thought occurred to me that I might be able to get a MBR from another Windows box freesbie# dd if=/dev/ad0 of=/mnt/nfs/tmp/XP.mbr bs=512 count=79 hosedbox# dd if=/mnt/nfs/tmp/XP.mbr of=/dev/ar1 bs=512 count=79 and write that over my bad MBR. Does that make sense? Is there a better way? Boot off the WinXP disc enter the repair utility (console). You can type 'help' for all the commands. There's a command called fixmbr; I think this is what you are looking for. Now this is getting OT, but recovery console doesn't show my drive. How do I know that it will fix the correct MBR? Don't I have two MBR's? one on each controller? -- Regards, Doug ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
