One possibility is that  NetBSD and FreeBSD were not installed with the same
BIOS geometry. This would confuse boot programs, reinstalling boot manager
several time may have messed it up a bit more ...

On Fri, Dec 03, 1999 at 01:59:20PM +0100, Reinoud Koornstra wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> First a description of what is going on and what happened.
> I have a i386 computer with two ide harddisks.
> I have on the second harddisk three partitions. The first two contain
> freebsd and the last contains netbsd.
> All were booting fine with the freebsd bootmanager (on the
> second harddisk).
> Yesterday i decided that a netbsd bootmanager on the second hd would be
> nicer, cause i also
> used a netbsd bootmanager on the first harddisk.
> Installing the netbsd bootmanager on the second hd went fine.
> But.... after rebooting....... freebsd didnt boot anymore.
> It also doesnt boot anymore from floppy. I concluded that the bootloader
> is broken or gone or something. 
> Now how is that possible after just installing the netbsd bootmanager on
> the second hd?
> Today i thought lets just use again the freebsd bootmanager again.
> So i installed that one on the second harddisk.
> AFter installing freebsd still doesnt boot (is logical according to what
> is wrote)..... but......... also NetBsd doesnt boot anymore!!!
> Okay..... the good thing is that i am able to boot netbsd still from
> floppy and point out to wd1a:netbsd. That works fine and netbsd boots.
> Finally i thought to put the netbsd bootmanager back on the second
> harddisk to be able to boot netbsd properly.
> However......... also the netbsd bootmanager cant boot netbsd anymore!
> I reinstalled the netbsd bootmanager twice to make sue something was
> wrong. I can type F3 to boot the netbsd (cause netbsd is on the third
> partition, normally that is). But when i try it now i just see after
> typing F3 "3" on the next line and nothing works....
> Nothing is booted.
> I dont know what to do anymore.
> The only way to acces netbsd one the second hd is with the install flop.
> >From there it boots fine if you say: boot wd1a:netbsd
> I really dont know what i can do to fix this.
> Yes yes, i know i tryed to many things and many not very smart things....
> But i dont understand..... cause i didnt destroy the partitions... they
> are all there working fine... i just changed the mbr some times.
> Can someone help me out here?
> Bye,
> 
> Reinoud.