Hi there
I need some help, quite urgently! I am a newcomer to Linux and BSD. I was running Suse Linux 10.1 on my HP Pavilion laptop and I also wanted to try Free BSD 6.1. I installed the Free BSD boot manager to the MBR without considering the consequences and for some reason find the computer completely unusable, unable to boot from CD ROM or the hard drive. I get an error message saying that no boot file is specified and that the partition table is invalid.

How do I go about fixing this isssue? I guess I have to somehow reinstall the Master Boot Record since this is what is preventing the computer from booting properly? My BIOS is set to boot from CD but all I get is a display with the product information on my computer and then the error messages. I am truly at my wit's end and would greatly appreciate anybody who can give me some advice to restore my computer. The computer is a HP Pavilion dv 5000.

Thanks in advance
preeth26

You should reinstall the boot manager you were using with Suse (Grub?) and add an entry to the configuration file for the FreeBSD system. Grub can certainly boot Suse and FreeBSD.

When you install FreeBSD (or any of the common *BSD variants) on a drive with an existing Linux installation, you should not install any boot manager/boot loader from *BSD, instead, you should simply add the new system to your existing boot loader config.

Hi there
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond, I really appreciate it! I fixed my problem, I called HP and they had me enter the BIOS to ensure that I was set up to boot from CD and then had me hit Enter repeatedly until the computer was forced to boot from the CD instead of returning an 'Invalid partition table' error message. I have everything up and running now, I was previously unable to even boot the computer from hard disk or cd.
Regards
preeth26

Glad that it is now working!

Randux: would you mind explaining *why* you should not install FBSD's boot loader (booteasy) when you already have a Linux system on the computer ?