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FreeBSD Installation and Upgrading Installing and upgrading FreeBSD. |
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Clean Install assistance requested
I'd like to preface this request with the statement that I have done somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 FreeBSD installs in the past year and have 5 years of experience as a Systems Administrator.
Is there any way within the FreeBSD installation media to clear out the records of old FreeBSD installs? Short of going to an external utility I have found no means to prevent the install procedure from adding F1, F2, F3, F4, etc to the boot menu. What I really want is to just completely erase it and start from scratch - anyone know of something on the FreeBSD install media that does this? |
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I've tried just repartitioning and using different partition geometries and I still see as many as 4 or 5 alternative boot options. I've gone so far as overwriting the contents of my disks with the contents of /dev/zero and /dev/urandom but they keep showing up.
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I have 2 SCSI drives that are not currently attached to a RAID card, and I'm only working with the first drive, ad0. When I complete the install and reboot the boot loaded displays that F1-F4 are FreeBSD, but none of them have valid boot loaders, and F5 is Disk 1 which also does not have a valid boot loader. I want to clear this menu.
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could it be some kind of boot flag?
we had discussion on this matter in last 1-2 weeks ago, but i don't remember if we solved it..... could you check using linux live CD how many boot flags you have? (shit happens, somehow, [i didn't believe it either], once i had 2 flags on same drive) |
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Using the Gentoo LiveCD I verified that there is only the one boot flag set. I have also verified this using a Debian LiveCD (just to cover my bases).
At this point I think my only option is to locate a DOS floppy and fdisk the MBR. |
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The following command will zero out the Master Boot Record, which includes the partition table, located at the first sector of a drive
Code:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=512 count=1
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You don't need to be a genius to debug a pf.conf firewall ruleset, you just need the guts to run tcpdump |
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I took advantage of that exact command, which also didn't work. Here's what did, ultimately:
First, I installed Linux and the GRUB bootloader, replacing the old BSD loader. A reboot indicated that my old boot loader was now gone and the GRUB boot loader was in charge. Second, I booted a LiveCD and wrote /dev/zero to my first drive using, as suggested: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=512 count=1 Finally, I installed FreeBSD 7 and my problems were solved. |
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Quote:
What's happening is that the boot loader scans the MBR, and adds a listing for each slice it finds. You (for whatever reason) created four slices. Hence, it creates the four F? entries in the boot loader. Only the first one has a kernel, so it's the only one that can actually be booted into. The FreeBSD boot loader fits ino the first block of the harddrive, making it a whopping 512 bytes in size. Don't expect anyhing exciting from it. Reading the man pages for booting and the loader will explain all this. |
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