My questions have to do with the mess I have left after trying to do
a dual-boot system with Win98SE and FreeBSD 4.9+.
After running the FreeBSD system for nearly a year, and loving it,
I finally got around to digging up the media I needed to do the
Win98SE install, and my FreeBSD partition is now unbootable. This,
obviously, is very disturbing.
I'll start off with an overview, and then providing increasingly
greater detail.
1) Install a placeholder C: partition of just under 2Gb for
future Windows installation.
2) Install FreeBSD in the remaining 65% of the drive, run
happily for a year
3) Fail in installing FreeBSD 5.2.1 in the placeholder Windows
partition, rendering computer unusable (BootMgr just beeps)
4) Recreate the Windows boot partition type by hand - the C: drive is now
gone, but FreeBSD works for weeks.
5) Finally get around to digging up and installing a copy of Windows 98SE.
6) Reinstall BootMgr, so helpfully ripped out by Windows.
FreeBSD now blows up on trying to boot. Windows 98 works (well, as
well as 98SE ever works).
The questions I'm going to get to and need answers for, based on the
details to follow are
1) What did I do wrong(other than using an MS-operating system, that's
just a series of unfortunate events which are unavoidable)?
2) Do I have any viable options other than just reinstalling at
this point (in which case, I might as well just go with 5.3
and be done with it)?
3) Will this happen again if I need to reinstall Win98se? What if
I install XP? Do I need to make any adjustments to my fdisk
partitions ward off problems in the future?
4) Is there any action I can take to help prevent others from
experiencing the pain I have just unwittingly inflicted on myself?
In a little greater detail, this is what I did:
1) Partition and format a placeholder C: drive of just under 2Gb
(1980Mb) in the first part of the disk, and format a C: drive there.
2) Install FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE on the rest of the drive, and
use CVSup on a different computer to track things for awhile
(That's how I got to stable+). Run happily for a nearly a
year, with KDE, OpenOffice, and other fun toys and productive
tools.
3) Decide that, since I'm not using the Windows partition yet
anyway, maybe it would be fun and productive to install
FreeBSD 5.2.1 in that partition to see if some of the laptop-specific
things that don't in FreeBSD 4 (like suspend/resume, automatic
battery monitoring, etc). This process failed, because
FreeBSD 5.2.1, even though it would BOOT from the CD-ROM drive,
would not recognize it once the MFS system was up and running!
I tried again with an NFS install after booting the MFS
system, but that hung after having scribbled on the
disk (still don't know why - gave up. This, incidentally,
wiped out the original Win98SE C drive formatting, which
may, ultimately, have been a part of my problems, or maybe it
has nothing to do with it - any insight here would be appreciated.)
4) The system was now unusable. BootMgr would just beep at
me, regardless of whether I picked F1 or F2.
I used the bootable CD sysinstall program to manually change
the partition type of the first back to 12 as it had
been when when the placeholder DOS/Win98 filesystem lived
there. The system was now, apparently, back to normal.
Although there was nothing to boot in the F1 partition, F2
brought up my FreeBSD 4.9+ system just fine. I had had
the DOS/Windows partition mounted as an msdos filesystem
and I had to remove that from /etc/fstab, but otherwise,
it seemed fine and I used it for weeks.
5) My son got some Windoze software for Christmas that would
not run on our old Windoze desktop, so I finally got around
to installing Windows 98SE, which installed and runs fine.
6) Windows so helpfully overwrote the MBR, eliminating the
BootMgr. I used the bootable CD and sysinstall AGAIN to
restore BootMgr
7) FreeBSD blows chunks when it tries to boot.
That covers the sequence of events in more detail, so let's go deep
with information and what I've done since.
The hardware is a Compaq Armada M700 laptop with a Pentium-III 650,
320Mb of RAM, and a 6Gb hard drive (Toshiba MK6015MAP) with a
kernel-reported geometry of c12416, h15, and s63, and a Compaq
CRN-8241B CD-ROM.
When I try to boot FreeBSD, this is what happens:
BTX loader 1.00 TX version is 1.01
Console: internal video/keyboard
BIOS drive A: is disk0
BIOS drive C: is disk1
BIOS 639kB/326592kB available memory
FreeBSD/i386 bootstrap loader, Revision 0.8
([EMAIL PROTECTED], Tue Feb 17 15:17:21 CST 2004)
Loading /boot/defaults/loader.conf
/kernel text=0x1a3573 data=0x2820c+0x1b8e8 syms=[0x4+02a7e0+0x4+0x31327]
-
Hit [Enter] to boot immediately, or any other key for command prompt.
Booting [kernel]...
/
int=000d err=f18c efl=00010002 eip=0011f405
eax=002a6580 ebx=002e8074 ecx= edx=00027520
esi=00343b84 edi=002e8074
