FreeBSD Boot Issue

Nicholas Blasgen
Mon, 07 Jun 2004 20:18:58 -0000

-- BACKGROUND IF YOU CARE --

I reinstalled Windows XP a little while ago and as usual it overwrote the
MBR.  So I used the 2nd FreeBSD disk to get into fixit mode, mounted my
local system's /usr, /boot, and the main files I could think of for /etc.  I
issued 'boot0cfg -B /dev/ad0' and rebooted.  Then I had what I expected
to
find which was a DOS boot as well as a FreeBSD boot.  Except the FreeBSD
partition only beeps at me and wont load.

So it must not be a bootable partition. Okay, so 2nd attempt.  I loaded up
the 2nd livesystem freebsd disk again, went into custom install, went into
the graphical fdisk (disk allocation is what they call it I guess), made the
partition bootable, and used the undocumented 'w' command to write the
partition table.  Now reboot again.

Okay, good.  FreeBSD starts to boot.  Loads the kernel fine, seems to do
everything fine, but comes to some issues where I need to specify the main
disk.  So I tell it ufs:ad0s4a.  Machine boots up in single user mode, I
mount all the extra drives it didn't load.  Everything seems fine as far as
I can tell but the boot wasn't multiuser because of some bad configuration.
So I decided to issues the boot0cfg command again and reboot.

-- THE REAL QUESTION --

Now I'm back with the FreeBSD block being unbootable.  So I know nothing
about how /boot/ configurations work.  Could someone tell me how to edit
files or an application to do so for the files in /boot/ so I can tell
boo0cfg that I want FreeBSD (/dev/ad0s4) to be a bootable partition?  I
think that'd solve everything.