Clean Install assistance requested

[dk_netsvil]

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?

[killasmurf86]

Put CD, repartition disk (you can skip this on partitions you keep data), make new labels, pick distributions, set up net, and install
then with packages/ports install what you want
simple, almost the way you did 1st time :)


If you don't need to save data, then just repartition all disk..... etc

[if i understand you correctly]

[dk_netsvil]

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.

[killasmurf86]

Boot options?
are you speaking about boot meny where you can boot in different modes, or before that, you can pick which drive to boot from?

How many HDD's you got in your box?

[dk_netsvil]

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.

[killasmurf86]

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)

[dk_netsvil]

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.

[killasmurf86]

No, no need for that, you can do this with any *nix using dd, just google, how to backup and restore MBR under linux....
but instead write nulls to mbr

[J65nko]

The following command will zero out the Master Boot Record, which includes the partition table, located at the first sector of a drive# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad0 bs=512 count=1

[dk_netsvil]

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.

[phoenix]

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.

Don't install the FreeBSD boot loader. When it asks during the install, always go with the middle option "Standard master boot record".

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.