FreeBSD and Win2k Dual Boot problem
 

Hi there!

I've decided to give FreeBSD 5.2.1 a second shot but I'm getting an error trying to boot win2k:

"NTLDR is missing"

I've seen some other threads here with similar problems regarding Fedora, but it did not help in my case. I also looked at a couple of links from google but they only tell how to retore windows boot loader and I don't want that... My partitions looks like this in a 20GB hardrive:

The unformatted slice I was planning to format later to make a common fat for both OS's. The partition with "*" is swap. During the installation I made sure that win2k partition (fat32) is set as bootable and so is BSD. I can boot FreeBSD without a single problem (and it boots amazingly fast), but when I choose "F1 = DOS" during the boot I got the NTLDR missing error. I can also access win2k partition through BSD without any problems.

There's nothing important on any of those partitions, I'm just testing FreeBSD and Win2k so I can later user FreeBSD in another box. So any suggestions, as crazy as it can be, would be great :D.

Thanks a lot in advance fellows!

EDIT:

Since we are at this, question:

What if booting with win2k CD and choosing fixmbr and/or booting with a win98 boot disk and typing fdisk /mbr does not restore the Windows bootloader? Because I've tried both solutions, and I still the same error, plus I cannot boot into FreeBSD anymore :). So, all questions:

1 - How to restore my boot loader?
2 - How to safely install FreeBSD and still be able to boot both Win2k and BSD?

Thanks!

Well, the fdisk /mbr wipes the MBR completely, so you'll need a new bootloader installed. I'm not too handy with installing grub from a floppy disk (if it can be done), but I do know there are some other bootloaders out there that you can use to try to salvage your installs. I used one recently, but I forget its name. If I think of it, I'll post it back here.

In the meantime, do you have access to a CD-R? Maybe you can use a http://www.freesbie.org boot disk to get into FreeBSD and fix the boot problems you are having. (You might be able to do it with Knoppix too, but I don't know what their support for FreeBSD filesystems is like).

Good luck,

Dave

Really, really thanks dkaplowitz!

I could manage to fix the MBR, now it boots win2k normally. What I did was, to boot with a win98 boot disk and at the prompt, I did:

A:\ sys c:

That restored the system files. Problem is, it's a win98 boot disk, so I've faced yet another problem :). I could not boot win2k with a win98 boot loader. I fired up Win2k Rescue Mode and fixed the installation. Now it boots fine. Its all a matter to reinstall FreeBSD boot loader again :). I took a look at freesbie, I've never heard of it before, but looks quite sweet :). I will give it a shot too.

Thanks a lot once again mate!

You should be able to get back into the FreeBSD installation with a good bootloader. I've generally found FreeBSD to be pretty good about working with existing partitions, so good luck getting the dual boot working. I think you'll be happy with FreeBSD...it's an awesome OS. Check out the BSD Forums as well....you can get lots of good help there.

Thanks again dkaplowitz!!!

Well, I still cannot boot FreeBSD. I've tried to make a clean install of both systems, but still the same problem. I then installed grub and either system I try to boot, I get:

Invalid Partition Table

I then played a little around Freebsd's ftp and downloaded two tools, rawrite.exe and fdimage.exe and boot.bin image. I tried to create under Win2k a boot disk with both fdimage and rawrite using boot.bin image. When I use the disk to boot, I surprisingly get:

Invalid Partition Table.

I've two questions though:

1 - Is it possible to create a boot disk, say with grub, that I can use it when I want to boot freeBSD, letting the MBR untouched? I've found some ways to use NTLDR to also boot freeBSD, but it's way to much work. A boot disk would be nice, how do I go by doing it?

2 - I'm planning to download Freesbie. I just wonder if it works like knoppix where we can, if we want, to also install it on the HD?. If so, does it use the same boot manager as FreeBSD (which clearly does not work for me..ghehe)?(I could not find any of those info at their page)

Thanks in advance!

Yes, you can have a floppy disk that will allow you to choose which OS to boot into, or to just use when you want to boot into whichever OS isn't the default. I've done it before, but it was a very long time ago, so I can't give you instructions. They should be easy to find though.

I don't know Freesbie all too much. You might want to look over their docs. You should have the option to install if you want. I think it's just a stripped down version of FreeBSD.

Sorry I couldn't help more.

Dave

Did you try installing the multiple boot MBR that was offered to you when you were installing FreeBSD? If you can boot into FreeBSD you can type $ sysinstall as root and fix anything that was broken.

I've never used Grub with FreeBSD, but googling it I found lots of comments:
http://geodsoft.com/howto/dualboot/grub.htm
for example...

Thanks a lot dkaplowitz and Marble!!!

I will try to follow that link and try to build grub like that. If it fails, maybe I will stick with a single boot-BSD only or Freesbie to learn FreeBSD :).

I've never had a problem dual booting FreeBSD. I just used the default bootloader (for multi-booting) using FreeBSD. It's ugly, but installing Grub and using a pretty Bootloader is not high on my list at this time...

Keep trying though. I think you will find BSD's are well thought out and easy to understand and the ports system is quite amazing. Kernel is easy to compile, etc... Lots of reasons to give it a try.

Marble, may I ask you something? Could you please post your partitions here ? I mean, there must be me doing something wrong. Did you do a /boot or did you install the boot loader at master boot record. My partitions looks like this:

first slice = win2k/FAT32
second slice = FAT32
third slice = Swap
fourth Slice = FreeBSD. ONLY "/" root partition

I wish I could post my actual df -h, but I cannot go to the internet with that computer :(.

Thanks!

P.S: the boot loader is ugly, but I kinda liked the Daemon made in ASCII, lol :)

The way I partitioned it (80 gig drive):

15 gigs XP - ntfs - installed XP, finished install (actually it was already installed when I decided to put BSD on this box.)

Put in the FreeBSD disc and FreeBSD will put all it's slices on one partition.
No need to make a swap partition outside the bsd partition.

Using FreeBSD's fdisk I just create another 15 gig partition and let the auto defaults slice it up. They are basically the same as I would do it anyways.

Now I install. It will prompt me if I plan on booting another OS. If so I select the FreeBSD multi boot loader (name?).

Install. Nothing more easy than that.

Now when you boot up it won't know what windows is, so it will appear as a ?? instead of windows. You will have to edit the <bootloader>.conf file and edit that in.

You are going to have to write something on the MBR. Or else boot off a floppy every time you boot up.

Thanks again Marble!

Well, I kinda got the feeling that FAT32 as my win2k partition is doing something funny in there. I'm formating it again as NTFS, install everything again and see how it goes :). I will keep you guys posted.

Now, about Freesbie, I've just downloaded and tried it out. Man, that thing is awesome... It works just as slow as Knoppix running from the CD (indeed) but when you startx, by default, it brings up a really amazinly configured XFCE4 environment. Really top notch stuff... Unfortunately, there seems to be not possible to make an HD install as Knoppix, but hey, I really loved that one :)...

Thanks all again!

LOL, no, still no go. I've then installed Win2k, then FreeBSD. This time, win2k is set as NTFS. When I got into the prompt screen to boot:

F1 = ??
F2 = DOS
F3 = FreeBSD

I can boot FreeBSD normally, but when I try to boot win2k I get:

NTLDR is Missing
Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart.

Guess I will have to wait for a while to play a little more with FreeBSD, afterall, I've been installing win2k and freebsd for two days in a row now :). I couldn't possibly be doing anything wrong now, so my wild guess is... there's something incompatible in this machine... either FreeBSD not liking the hard-drive or something...

Thanks for the help guys, I catch ya later if I decide to run only FreeBSD or Freesbie ;).

Have you tried using Lilo?
I am NOT booting Win2K, but do have FreeBSD, Solaris, and Windows 98 all booting. Couple Linux distros also.
I am going to keep your 'a:\sys c:' in mind. I have seen this problem mentioned before and hope I never need to know any more about it.

Thanks 2damncommon!

Yeah, I've been googling a lot last night, and it seems to be a more common problem then I thought. Well, anyway, now I'm all set with FreeBSD only in my other machine so I can learn it a little bit. That is going to be good practice, since I could never compile a kernel successfully (shame, I know) and with BSD it's a must, since the sound card driver is not into the kernel by default.

So far, it looks cool. Sure, the first error message that I got: "libutil.so.3 not found" trying to run Blender, I had no idea how to fix(and I still don't, I've tried to enable dri and glx on the XF86Config, but that did not help..ghehe), but I'm working on it. If it was Linux, in few seconds I could find my way, but will take a time to get used to FreeBSD :).