Starting up FreeBSD 5?

[dysharmonic]

Hi

I've finished installing FreeBSD 5.0 on my IDE secondary master, if I remember the device convention well, it should be /dev/ad1s3 (3rd slice on that disk(?)).

Installation went smooth w/ package selection and all. At the boot manager installation, I chose to have it on / I guess and not on the MBR.
Other than that, it didnt ask if I wanted a boot floppy or not.

After a reboot, ntloader shows up, as I already tripple boot this system.

How do I start FreeBSD? Do I need to the "dd if=" thing and copy it over to Windows partition to be read by ntloader?

Thanx.

[ricstr]

Cant you put the installaion disc in again goto the option where you set up partitions but dont change or delete your partitions. Then when your finished it will prompt you to select you location for boot loader, choose MBR. Exit the setup and boot to the hard disc.

This should work.

[dysharmonic]

Thanx but I guess I'm not ready to have the FBSD boot loader on the MBR. I'm a total noob w/ FSBD, I might screw up and wont be able to start Windows or RHL 8.

Anyway, how do I create a boot disk under FSBD? But I need to get in first, right?

Thanx.

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

I would suggest using either Red Hat's lilo or grub for multibooting.

All you would have to do there is add an entry in the bootloader for FreeBSD. In Linux /dev/ad1s3 would be /dev/hdb3, I think.

You could still use ntloader to dual boot between Linux and Windows, but when you select Linux, you'd then be presented a choice to either boot into Linux or FreeBSD.

If you're going to be doing a lot of multibooting, I'd suggest looking into URL=http://www.xosl.org/]XOSL[/URL] . It's a GUI bootloader that you can configure at boot time. To install it, all you need is a DOS bootdisk or a FAT partition to have it reside on. You can't install it from Windows 2000 or XP, though. You'd actually have to boot from a DOS floppy and then install the bootloader.

[dysharmonic]

Alex. You got my pm?

As you said I just made a new entry in lilo and booting is taken care of now.

However, I cant get X to start.

Did the xf86config thing and startx just locks my system up.

My video card, GeForce 2 MX was detected w/ the driver nv. I remember in RHL, it's nvidia.

I guess I'll just have to d/load nvidia's latest drivers for Fbsd. I'll let you guys know if there's any progress.

Thanx.

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

Originally posted by Fahrenheit451
Alex. You got my pm?

As you said I just made a new entry in lilo and booting is taken care of now.

However, I cant get X to start.

Did the xf86config thing and startx just locks my system up.

My video card, GeForce 2 MX was detected w/ the driver nv. I remember in RHL, it's nvidia.

I guess I'll just have to d/load nvidia's latest drivers for Fbsd. I'll let you guys know if there's any progress.

Thanx.

Sorry, I didn't get your PM. When did you send it?

If it's about NVIDIA drivers, I've never owned an NVIDIA card, so I wouldn't be much help to you. Besides, I don't provide help in PMs anyways. Why not try posting the problems you're having as a new thread in this forum?

[oubipaws]

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=freebsd_1.0-4365

Those drivers will get your graphics card up in running in no time :D

[dysharmonic]

Ok, I got evertyting installed and got X and mouse working fine. However when I chose to boot into gnome (from the CD - post install config), some error messages were displayed and gnome didnt seem to work well.

Logged out of gnome, gave the command reboot, the system gave another message "press any key to reboot".

Upon reboot, I got this:

Mouting root from ufs:/dev/ad1s1a
pid 88 (fsck_ufs), uid 0:exited on signal 8
pid 89 (fsck_ufs), uid 0:exited on signal 8

It just stayed there that I had to give the 3 finger salute to reboot.

What gives?

Thanx.

[dysharmonic]

Well, I did another reinstallation, all is cool now.
:cool: