On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 06:57:41AM -0500, Nick Holland wrote: > > The MBR contains the FreeBSD bootloader. At startup, the machine displays > > HA! > > > F1 FreeBSD > > F2 BSD > > > > But when I press F2 I just get a beep. > > which proves conclusively that I was right, it isn't an OpenBSD problem, > as you clearly didn't load the PBR. FreeBSD bumbling the load doesn't > define an OpenBSD problem. Put the OpenBSD MBR in place, and it will > load fine.
Thank you for your patience, and my apologies for drawing hasty conclusions from the documentation which was available to me. For the benefit of the archive, I have now solved the problem by re-installing the FreeBSD MBR as follows: boot0cfg -B -v ad0 which indicates it is using options=packet,update,nosetdrv (the defaults). I can only imagine that a fresh FreeBSD install is writing an MBR with options=nopacket, and I'll raise this on a FreeBSD list. > > "you MUST > > BE SURE that all partitions which you want to boot from must start and end > > below cylinder 1024 by the BIOS's idea of the disk, and that all DOS > > partitions MUST EXIST ENTIRELY BELOW cylinder 1024, or you will either not > > be able to boot OpenBSD, not be able to boot DOS, or you may experience > > data loss or filesystem corruption." > > That's an oops. > That's a big oops. > That gives me something to do this evening... > > Nick. Thanks for picking this up. Regards, Brian.