JVC MP-XP7210 Missing Operating System

[Kevin Oberman]

> Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 17:06:02 +0200
> From: Axel Steiner <ast at treibsand.com>
> 
> Hi,
> 
> > No CD? Ouch. That does make things a bit difficult.
> 
> yes, it's a Subnotebook. There's no space for a cd ;)
> 
> > Which sysinstall options did you use? Any of them should have asked you
> > about installing an MBR. If you have only FreeBSD on the disk, I'd
> > suggest just using the standard MBR and not the FreeBSD MBR.
> 
> I used the standard MBR. 
> 
> > You can also install a standard MBR with a DOS disk or get a FIXIT
> > floppy and use that to get a slim version of FreeBSD up so that you can
> > try to track down the problem. It will include boot0cfg. Or just use the
> > floppies to bring up sysinstall and select "Configure". Than you can
> > select "Fdisk" to verify the slices. Make sure that the FreeBSD slice is
> > flagged as bootable. If not, you have the option of setting it. When you
> > select the "Write changes" option, it will put up a warning about
> > sysinstall normally not wanting you to do a write, but you will not be
> > re-installing the OS, so you can write it.
> 
> I also tried the osbs135.exe to create a new MBR/Bootloader. But then
> I also couldn't boot and got "read error". The slice was marked as bootable.
> 
> > When you exist Fdisk, you will get a request to define the MBR. If you
> > will have multiple OSes on the system, you probably want "BootMgr". If
> > FreeBSD is the only OS, select "Standard".
> > 
> > Then select "Label" to look at the partition table. This will only list
> > named and sizes, but it is something to check on.
> > 
> > Unless you modify the slices or partitions, these operations will not
> > cause the loss of any of the OS files on the disk. Neither will setting
> > the slice to bootable.
> 
> What me really confused is that FreeBSD 4.11 works perfectly, but 5.4 won't
> boot after installing. Now I solved the problem by upgrading 4.11 -> 5.4
> Had sysinstall heavily changed since 4.11? 

sysinstall(8) has not changed too much. The biggest change is that it is
now part of the standard OS build and not part of the make release
build.

But LOTS of stuff under sysinstall has changed. GEOM and UFS2 come to
mind as very significant changes that tie into booting. When you upgrade
from 4.11 to 5.4, you don't get UFS2 partitions and this is a major
reason to do a clean install. But UFS2 does not buy that much on most
laptop systems, so it's probably not worth worrying about.

V5 really changed almost everything at some level and many of the
changes tie into the bootstrap operation in some way of another. For
laptops, V5 is a huge win, but it is a bigger win for newer laptops as
it supports many features that V4 simply didn't.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634