[sde]

I'm more of a debian guy, but I finally got another system up and running and want to learn more about BSD.

I've installed 5.3, but when it is time to restart, it doesn't seem to find my boot partition.

I've partitioned it as follows:
/boot 32MB
/swap 128MB
/var 1024MB
/ 10240MB

I did flag the /boot partion as bootable. Can anyone give me any advice to get this setup to boot?

[bmw]

How come you created a partition for /boot? The boot system looks for /boot/loader in the root partition. Reinstall and try just accepting the defaults for partitions. It will create ...

/
<swap>
/tmp
/usr
/var
/home

[maybe not /home -- I haven't installed one in a few weeks.]

[molotov]

hmm, I think your problem is youre creating primary partitions instead of bsd-style silces. Read the handbook on disk formatting, it explains it far better than I could:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-steps.html

[Strog]

How come you created a partition for /boot? The boot system looks for /boot/loader in the root partition. Reinstall and try just accepting the defaults for partitions. It will create ...

/
<swap>
/tmp
/usr
/var
/home

[maybe not /home -- I haven't installed one in a few weeks.]

Yep, it still symlinks /home to /usr/home unless you explictly create a partition for /home. The auto defaults should be good enough for most general use. You'll tweak it a little for specific purposes but you'll likely know exactly what you want by that time.

[bmw]

hmm, I think your problem is youre creating primary partitions instead of bsd-style silces.

That will depend on whether he groks the *BSD nomenclature for "slices" and "partitions". If he's using the word "partitions" to mean Unix FS mount points, and not DOS FDISK partitions, then he's gonna be all right.

I think he may have that right because you cannot actually name FDISK slices. OTOH, he does say he "flagged the /boot partition as bootable" which suggests he might be using FDISK to do that, thus using slices.

Strog, you may be right! :-)

So sde: read the link that Strog gave, and reinstall; this time letting FreeBSD do the heavy lifting for you. "Use the Force, Luke." :-)

[sde]

wow thanks for all the advice!

i think i was talking about paritions. and then i wasn't really slicing the partition, but rather setting the entire partition as 1 slice. ( i think )

anyway, i think you guys pointed me in the right direction. can't wait to get home and try it now. kk and strog hooked me up with the manual link too in irc, so i'm going to spend some time RTFM :D

thanks!

[Atlas]

One of the things I've had to get used to coming from the Windows and commercial world where documentation sucks is that *BSD docs are usually very clear, helpful, and readily available. And for the odd question the handbook can't answer, there's always SE =)

[sde]

i'm noticing that. the manual has answered a lot of questions tonight .. so has everyone in irc. it's nice to have a friendly group here .. some *nix communities are uber snobs.

well i'm up and running.. thank you all =)

[molotov]

Rock on, enjoy it. Atlas is right, the man pages and the handbook and google can slove 99% of questions. Search the forums, search the mailing lists, search google (and google.com/bsd), use man -k, and search the handbook. If you still have problems, we're friendly =) (although you'll see that questions that have searched all avalible resources get better responses)
Have a good one, and once again enjoy your system, its sexxy =)