From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Sep 3 9:24:14 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from post.webmailer.de (natpost.webmailer.de [192.67.198.65]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B37EF37B405 for ; Mon, 3 Sep 2001 09:24:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from stefan-bt (p3E9B8E56.dip.t-dialin.net [62.155.142.86]) by post.webmailer.de (8.9.3/8.8.7) with SMTP id SAA08891 for ; Mon, 3 Sep 2001 18:24:08 +0200 (MET DST) From: Stefan Hoffmeister To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: How can I use the NT loader to boot FreeBSD? Date: Mon, 03 Sep 2001 18:24:00 +0200 Organization: Econos Message-ID: X-Mailer: Forte Agent 1.8/32.548 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi, yes, I have read the FAQ at http://www.de.freebsd.org/FAQ/admin.html#NT-BOOTLOADER but I guess I am too dense / nervous to grok it :-) Some relevant information first: Two SCSI hard disks: Disk 1: System partition Windows 2000 boot partition (NTFS) Disk 2: FreeBSD 4.3 Linux swap Linux NTFS Right now I am booting FreeBSD through the NT loader booting to LILO, which is configured simply as other=/dev/sda1 table=/dev/sda label=FreeBSD so that it hands everything off to FreeBSD (yes, weird, but it works). Now for my questions: 1.) "If FreeBSD is installed on the same disk as the NT boot partition" Is the NT boot partition the partition that contains "ntldr", "boot.ini", or is it the partition where NTOSKRNL.EXE is located, i.e. (in MS terminology) multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="W2K" /fastdetect I suspect the former, but in my case this obviously does not matter. Others might appreciate the clarification, though. 2.) "/boot/boot0 needs to be installed using sysinstall" To which partition does it need to be installed? I assume that this is the MBR of the *FreeBSD* disk (in my case disk 2), right? 3.) MBR + "active" flag fun FWIW, all this talk about fiddling with the MBR and activating of partitions by the FreeBSD boot loader makes me pretty nervous. I know that by booting into DOS and issuing an "fdisk C: /mbr" with some fiddling of active flags (where W2K apparently is pretty sensitive) I can make W2K happy again. But it is a pain. Ideally, there would be some kind of "passive" command that *only* updates /boot/boot0, allowing me to copy /boot/boot0 to C:\FREEBSD.BS. I don't want FreeBSD to ever write outside of its own "physical" partition - and this includes that it should not write to any MBR of any disk at all. If this can be accomplished at all, I'd appreciate hints :-) The one thing I do like about LILO is that it is pretty obvious where it writes to (aka "modifies data"): It is the boot sector referred to by "boot=". And nowhere else. Thoughts appreciated. TIA, Stefan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message