Needmyhedred said :
quote: I just have to find a way to access it <hint,hint>.
Glanz replied :
Well, if you let the BSD install it's MBR then well have to do it that way. Normally, Lilo or Grub are capable of placing FreeBSD (DesktopBSD is FreeBSD) in the boot selection menu. But if your install rewrote the MBR, then we'll have to add Linux to the MBR.
If you have installed boot0 and multiple operating systems on your hard disks, then you should see a display similar to this one at boot time:
F1 DOS F2 FreeBSD (or DesktopBSD) F3 Linux F4 ?? F5 Drive 1
Default: F2
If you don't have that at boot you want to replace your existing MBR with the FreeBSD MBR then use the following command:
# fdisk -B -b /boot/boot0 device
where device is the device that you boot from, such as ad0 for the first IDE disk, ad2 for the first IDE disk on a second IDE controller, da0 for the first SCSI disk, and so on.
On PCs, a boot manager typically occupies sector 0 of a disk, which is known as the Master Boot Record (MBR). The MBR contains both code (to which control is passed by the PC BIOS) and data (an embedded table of defined slices).
First, lets try tomake the MBR writeable. It probably wont solve the problem right away, but it is a step in the right direction. Here's the command to do that: (terminal as su) <b>sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=16</b> Then retry the above. If the system doesn't understand the command, don't worry, I'll come up with something soon.
grub> root (hd0,a) grub> kernel /boot/loader grub> boot
...is what I remember from one of my installs... That loads the BSD loader /boot/loader which should still be there in spite of the grub install.
NOTE: If the system being installed with FreeBSD is already setup with GRUB, then you should have changed the default form installing FreeBSD's boot loader to "None" so as to make no changes to the MBR.
But we'll see if we can't simply fix things. It's not complicated. I just have to remember the commands. Since I am senile and over 100 years old, I may get a headache.
If nothing else works, you may have to install GRUB (BSD has this available), and maybe configure the GRUB files to take into consideration the Linux section taking into account BSD naming conventions (maybe). So now is the time to go to your old GRUB configuration files and copy them for reference. If you can't find them from BSD, just forget it.
If you had made a boot floppy during your Debian install, you could use that to boot into Debian then edit the GRUB configs to take into consideration the BSD install but using Linux naming conventions.
So here's my recommendation in a Nut's shell (I'm the nut):
Do not install GRUB yet from the free BSD mirrors.
I'll go over to Debian mirrors and try to find a way to make a boot floppy or a CD booter from them that will get you into Debian so you can reconfigure/ reinstall GRUB (dpkg-reconfigure or a apt-get install --reinstall grub or something like that.)
You can just insert your Debian installation CD then start your machine, and when the install screen comes up, check the options. Boot from CD into your Debian system. Reinstall GRUB. Grub may or may not recognize your BSD install then when you reboot you will have a grub menu to choose either BSD or Debian instead of the over simplified BSD loader.
It will be easier later to configure grub to add BSD to the grub boot menu than adding Linux to the BSD loader because of the naming convention differences.