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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!newsfeed.nacamar.de!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Installation, first time Date: 23 Mar 1997 20:56:34 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 34 Message-ID: <5h45e2$ii7@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <5h0bmp$hmq$1@news.flinet.com> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:37637 ioannis@shell.flinet.com (Ioannis Tambouras) wrote: > Once I got freeBSD 2.1.7 installed, I never managed to boot to it. It > seems like the boot manager never gets installed on MBR and I get "NO BASIC > SYSTEM" (or something similar) from the bios. This means your MBR is trashed. It misses the usual signature (0x55aa), so the BIOS ignores the disk as a bootable medium, and proceeds to the next one. If no bootable medium is available, it tells you that you have no ROM BASIC. That's a neat leftover joke back from the old PC... ;-) See whether your first sector has a useful fdisk table at all or not. If so, simply recreating the bootstrap in the MBR might help. This can be done with ``fdisk /mbr'' under DOS, or with ``fdisk -i'' under FreeBSD (boot the installation floppy, select `fixit', and enter a fixit floppy). You have to reinstall the boot manager later however. > that it was done. Currently I know of no way of booting to freeBSD. If I > use boot.flp and answer with "sd(1,a)kernel" (or all possible combination > thereof, i.g. sd(1,b)/kernel, etc.) most of the time I get prompted back > and I have to reboot in order to re-install again. What do you get back as a prompt here? sd(1,a)/kernel _should_ work. If it doesn't, it probably means your installation is seriously hosed. I wonder how you did this... -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)