Conrad J. Sabatier wrote: > I burned a copy of FreeBSD-8.2-RELEASE-amd64-disc1.iso to CD. It > booted and ran OK, but I encountered some rather odd behavior in a few > places: > > As another user mentioned elsewhere, the packages distributions are > beyond minimal, consisting only of some basic documentation in a > variety of locales or languages. No software packages at all. > > Worse still, though, is what I ran across in the > partitioning/labeling/boot record section of sysinstall; no more > "dangerously dedicated" mode (unless you go into "expert" mode, which > is rather a mystery to me), and worse yet, it seems that the options to > install a plain master boot record or boot manager have no effect > whatsoever!
"Dangerously dedicated" is being deprecated in favor of more modern ways and methods to slice and partition. You should no longer seek to utilize it, and I think, if memory serves there was some talk at one time on removing it from fdisk and/or sysinstall. > This is causing me no end of grief, as I'm trying to return this > machine back to FreeBSD after having run Linux on it for some time. > The only reason I initially installed Linux was that, at the time I > bought the machine, neither my hard drive nor my CD drive were being > recognized by FreeBSD (this has been fixed since then, I'm happy to > report). > > The really crucial problem I'm facing right now is that I can't get > Linux's damned "grub" off of my hard drive! I was hoping that using > "dangerously dedicated" mode in sysinstall would allow me to overwrite > the lingering copy of grub on my hard drive that I just can't seem to > get rid of. The FreeBSD install works for the most part, despite the > few oddities mentioned above, but when I try to boot into it afterwards, > grub seizes control and hangs with an error code. > > I've tried numerous workarounds, using boot0cfg and both FreeBSD's and > Linux's fdisk and friends, but to no avail. I'm stymied at this point, > and desperately in need of some advice here. > > Can some sage person out there help me out of this predicament? Right > now I feel like I'm doomed to keep running Linux or nothing at all! I > am dying to get back to FreeBSD again. > Sounds like you need to zero the first part of your drive. The following is best done before installing, rather than afterwards. Either boot a LiveFS CD (which I have done before) or, I believe this is also possible from the Fixit shell (which I have not tried). In order to gain the ability to "force" writes to this area do this at a root prompt: sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16 then to zero out the beginning of your disk do: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/adx oseek=1 bs=512 count=1 where x is the drive number. This should get the grub gone. Then install as normal. With the grub MBR out of the way you should now be able to install FreeBSD bootloader/MBR as you have in the past. -Mike _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[email protected]"
