*BSD News Article 28507


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From: mwilley@pcocd2.intel.com (Mark Willey - PCD)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: booteasy problem: 2 IDE drives
Date: 17 Mar 1994 16:29:27 GMT
Organization: Intel Corporation
Lines: 83
Sender: mwilley@pcocd2 (Mark Willey - PCD)
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <2ma0h7$aj8@inews.intel.com>
References: <CMsw6M.DJ0@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: fiw206.intel.com
Originator: mwilley@sedona


In article <CMsw6M.DJ0@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>, pi@nickel.ucs.indiana.edu (Raymond L. Gilbert) writes:

> running MS-DOS.  When I started setting up FreeBSD 1.0, I completely
> disconnected it and connected another IDE drive to install BSD on.

Keeping this in mind for my question below marked with (**)...

> Tonight was the night I finally felt comfortable enough with my
> FreeBSD system to take the bold step of trying to hook my other
> drive back up.  I had previously grabbed a copy of BOOTEASY
> specifically in anticipation of this step.

Okay, first off, did you recompile your kernel, re-install modified boot
blocks, and reconfigure your /etc/fstab file?  If not, well, it ain't gonna
work.  If you need help w/ this, I've got a text file I've wrote up with the
short of it that I can send you for a NetBSD system, but it should be similar
for FreeBSD.

> 	The situation I wanted to set up was to have my 124 meg IDE
> MS-DOS drive as the 1st drive, and my 340 meg IDE FreeBSD drive as the
> 2nd drive.  When I tried to boot my computer, it sat there for a long
> time and finally gave me the insightful message:
> 
> Error Reading drive D:
> Press F1 to resume

> 	Well, F5 didn't give me anything except the menu again, but
> after a lot of coaxing, I finally got to my drive C with F1.  It wasn't
> behaving normally however... things were taking a really long time for
> simple things like even dir.  I thought maybe if I got BOOTEASY loaded
> up I could solve everything and just be able to choose which hard
> drive I wanted to boot from.  BOOTEASY took a loooong time to load up
> and finally reported error 128 writing to drive 0.  I wasn't exactly
> sure which drive this was any more since my DOS drive was acting so
> strangely.
> 	When I disconnected my FreeBSD drive, everything seemed to
> work perfectly normally.  I ran BOOTEASY again and of course it only
> was able to configure the one drive.

> 	Finally I gave up and decided I needed to do something fancy
> with the disklabel on my 2nd drive like it suggessts in the FAQ.  So I
> disconnected my DOS drive and connected my FreeBSD drive alone, and
> guess what?  Now my FreeBSD drive comes up with the BOOTEASY prompt.

> 	When I try to hit F1, it just gives me the menu again.  Since
> then, I haven't been able to access my FreeBSD system at all! :-(

(**) Okay, have you *EVER* moved a jumper or switch on your FreeBSD drive?

If not, then the computer doesn't know the difference between your two
drives.  They are two and the same.  :)  I'm suprised it even booted, but
BootEasy might have helped that...

If this isn't the case, let me know and we'll try something else...

> a) Is my 340 meg IDE drive totally hosed?  Do I need to start from the
> 	beginning and re-install everything from scratch again?  Or is
> 	there a way to recover my origianl boot sector?  Currently, I
> 	have no way of reliably establishing a link between BOOTEASY
> 	and my 2nd drive.

If what happened is what I think happened, you may be in trouble.  Perhaps somehow you can restore the original boot blocks to your drive, but that would require booting UNIX first.  :(

> b) once I get a) settled (one way or the other), what do I need to do
> 	be able to choose which drive I boot off of? (I've got no
> 	particular attacthment to BOOTEASY; I just thought from
> 	discussions I read on here that it would be the easiest).

I am using OS-BS 2.0 Beta to select between wd0-OS/2 and wd1-NetBSD.

> Thanks a million in advance to anyone that can help me solve any of 
> these perplexing problems! :-)

My bank account number is...  ;-)

Mark  (a Purdue man)
-- 
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Mark Willey                                                 916-356-5477
Intel Corporation, FM2-48                       mwilley@pcocd2.intel.com
1900 Prairie City Rd, Folsom, CA 95630	  I speak for myself, not Intel.
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