*BSD News Article 27494


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From: bri@qualcomm.com (Brian Ellis)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Why does FreeBSD only boot from floppy for me?
Date: 16 Feb 1994 13:08:04 -0700
Organization: QUALCOMM, Incorporated; San Diego, CA, USA
Lines: 33
Message-ID: <2jtuf4$1gv@qualcomm.com>
References: <1994Feb16.102445.5901@paramount.nikhefk.nikhef.nl>
NNTP-Posting-Host: redcloud.qualcomm.com

In article <1994Feb16.102445.5901@paramount.nikhefk.nikhef.nl>,
Eloy Domingos <eloy@paramount.nikhefk.nikhef.nl> wrote:

>I saw with fdisk that this 4th partition was made active by the installation.
>However, since I always booted from the IDE drive, there was no MBR present
>at all on the SCSI disk. I think FreeBSD also didn't install one because
>I didn't use the whole disk for it. So I did a fdisk/mbr from DOS which
>installed the standard MBR on the SCSI drive. I made sure the FreeBSD 
>partition was still active, and tried to boot from the SCSI drive (IDE
>drive still disabled).
>
>However, the system prints "Mission operating system" (or something like that)
>and then halts. It seems like the MBR tries to boot from the FreeBSD 
>partition but it doesn't recognize a valid operating system there, 
>understandable because DOS won't recognize FreeBSD.
>
>Do I need a special MBR present to be able to boot? If so, how do I install 
>it? 

You're on the right track. The Master Boot Record installed by DOS's fdisk
will only boot DOS. What you really need is to install a boot manager such
as OS-BS. OS-BS is really just a Master Boot Record that can boot
multiple systems.

-brian

|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Broad-mindedness, n.:                                                       |
|         The result of flattening high-mindedness out.                       |
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| Brian Ellis (bri@qualcomm.com) __                                ___        |
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