lost with booting

[Matthew Dillon]

:-On [20040907 23:02], Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai (asmodai at xxxxxx) wrote:
:>I should try and see if FreeBSD 4.10 or 5.2 installs and works.
:
:After booting with ACPI disabled I installed from my 5.2 media.  I did a
:minimal custom install.
:Upon booting I chose F2 - BSD and FreeBSD 5.2 managed to just boot my
:installation at the same location I have had DF installed and failing to
:boot.  (Somewhere after 125 GB on a Maxtor 6y200p0 on an Asus a7n8x with
:latest BIOS.)
:
:With both I can boot my 1st slice, which is Windows XP.
:
:Matt, I think you need to concentrate on the bootcode again. :(
:
:-- 
:Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(at)wxs.nl> / asmodai / kita no mono

    I can't make heads or tails of it.  All I can think of is that maybe
    you are running a mix of different types of boot code?  The 5.x
    boot1/boot2/loader code is not compatible with the DFly boot1/boot2/loader
    code because our partition table is larger.  'boot0' (the master boot
    record) should always be compatible.

    It is unclear to me *which* CD you tried installing DFly from.  It might
    be best to try installing the boot code from an official CD.  I recommend
    using a GCC-2.95 daily snapshot CD or the latest reasonably-stable CD
    that I just rolled (dfly-20040907.iso.gz).

    You can also experiment with just overriding the boot blocks and loader
    binary from a DFly CD.  Boot the DFly CD and use disklabel and cp to
    install new boot blocks over an existing configuration, like this:

	[boot cd, login as root]
	disklabel -B ad0s2
	mount ad0s2a /mnt
	cp /boot/loader /mnt/boot/loader
	umount /mnt
	halt
	[remove CD, try booting from the HD again]

    If you are trying to boot a dragonfly slice, you must have dragonfly
    boot1/boot2 blocks installed on that slice.  That is, you have to proper
    disklabel the slice, for example:

    disklabel -B ad0s2

    In the past we have found that 'garbage' in the slice can screw up 
    booting, so to be totally safe I'd blow it away completely and reinstall.

	dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0s2 bs=32k count=16
	disklabel -r -w ad0s2 auto
	disklabel -B ad0s2
	... reinstall dragonfly from scratch on that slice ...

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>