i386/66248: FreeBSD bootloader is confused by booting from USB flash, trashes main drives boot block

[David Bremner]

>Number:         66248
>Category:       i386
>Synopsis:       FreeBSD bootloader is confused by booting from USB flash, trashes main drives boot block
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       low
>Responsible:    freebsd-i386
>State:          open
>Quarter:        
>Keywords:       
>Date-Required:
>Class:          sw-bug
>Submitter-Id:   current-users
>Arrival-Date:   Tue May 04 04:50:24 PDT 2004
>Closed-Date:
>Last-Modified:
>Originator:     David Bremner
>Release:        FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE-p3 i386
>Organization:
University of New Brunswick
>Environment:
System: FreeBSD convex.cs.unb.ca 5.2.1-RELEASE-p3 FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE-p3 #12: Fri Mar 19 11:08:54 AST 2004 bremner at convex.cs.unb.ca:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/CONVEX2 i386


	
>Description:
	I was experimenting with booting FreeBSD from a USB flash card 
	with 1 fat partition, with booteasy (written from /stand/sysinstall).
	It seemed to be in an infinite loop of (hard) rebooting, with 
	self-test and all.

	Booting from the harddrive now presents 
		F1 DOS.
	Which does not boot the windows XP partition

	Conjecture:
		At some point I suceeded enough for the bootloader 
	to want to make a note of what it booted last, but it wrote back 
	the wrong boot block.


	
>How-To-Repeat:
	
	see above.
>Fix:

	
	Perhaps just a warning somewhere (fdisk?).






>Release-Note:
>Audit-Trail:
>Unformatted: