# Dual-boot setup fails



## fmw (Jan 13, 2011)

Hi everyone, 

first of all, apologies to wblock and Sir Dice for not moving on with the other threads I started, but 3 HDDs died on me last week, making up for a bit of a delay.

So I went and got me this new 500GB HD, with my mind set on installing both FreeBSD and WinXP on this disk. Before, I had 2 disks and I'd use the BIOS to pick the boot disk.
(I still need Doze for some antediluvian scanners which aren't fully supported by sane)

I installed XP on the first partition, moved on to FreeBSD and installed that according to the following scheme:

50GB - Win
200GB - Freebsd System
rest - Data, possibly encrypted.

Everything seemed to be fine, XP would boot, BSD as well, then I spent some time
installing updates and programs on Windows. After that, I couldn't boot BSD any more.
With the FreeBSD boot manager, that is.

I tried to fix it manually,


```
bsdlabel -B /dev/ad6s2a
```
run from my previous BSD installation returned no error but didn't help, after attempting to fix the MBR with fdisk, I couldn't boot Windows any more so back to page one.

Installed Windows, ran updates, boots fine.
Installed BSD, Congratulations, you have now installed FreeBSD, Windows still boots,
but when I pick BSD, nothing happens, and I need to Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart.

When I boot the installation CD and enter the label editor, I still see the partitions and slices, but the mount points are gone. Huh?

TIA,
Frank,
just slightly desperate  :\


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## fmw (Jan 14, 2011)

I just used the BSDinstall live CD to check the installation, everything seems to be where it should be, /etc/fstab seems to look good, too. So the question that remains is: what is destroying the mount points?


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## wblock@ (Jan 14, 2011)

After you have installed the system, stop using sysinstall.  Where filesystems are mounted is controlled by /etc/fstab, which is on one of those filesystems.  Being an installation tool, I think sysinstall ignores that.

AFAIK, BSDInstall is an experimental setup.  No idea whether it does normal things.

As to why it isn't booting, can't tell.  What are you picking "BSD" from?  FreeBSD multi-boot manager?  Showing more specifics may help, like the output of bsdlabel(8) for the slice in question:
`% bsdlabel ad0s2`


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## fmw (Feb 11, 2011)

Just for the sake of completeness: The whole problem was probably caused by a faulty optical drive - the disk controller of the main board in question seems to behave strangely on both IDE channels when there's a problem on one of them.


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