From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jan 2 13:54:39 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from operamail.com (operamail.infinite.com [199.29.68.126]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0E2E137B405 for ; Wed, 2 Jan 2002 13:54:37 -0800 (PST) X-WM-Posted-At: operamail.com; Wed, 2 Jan 02 16:54:35 -0500 X-WebMail-UserID: Jud Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 16:54:35 -0500 From: Jud To: freebsd-questions , Walt Pawley X-EXP32-SerialNo: 00000000 Subject: RE: replacing the Boot Manager Message-ID: <3C34D292@operamail.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: InterChange (Hydra) SMTP v3.62 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 >===== Original Message From Walt Pawley ===== >Having a working system I'd rather not destroy and not being smart enough >to know what's going on in detail, I'd like to know whether one can replace >(or reconfigure) the Boot Manager on a driver without affecting that >drive's other contents. All the references I can find only describe things >from the point of view of starting out. > >Specifically, I foolishly put a Boot Manager on the drive and now I'd >rather not have it interfering with the computer booting automatically. Yes. First back up onto some other medium (tape, zip drive, another disk) any data you're not willing to lose. Now - are you wanting to just boot FreeBSD, or does it share your computer with another OS? If you want to reconfigure/delete the FreeBSD boot manager, /stand/sysinstall will get you all the options you originally set when you installed FreeBSD. If you just want the Windows boot loader, type fdisk /mbr after booting into DOS using a floppy disk. The nicest boot manager I've found is GRUB, which is in the FreeBSD ports collection under sysutils. Even including a careful review of the documentation, installing it and setting it up the way I liked was a matter of 15-20 minutes' time. You can configure it to "not interfere with the computer booting automatically" as default behavior, but to let you easily do something else (for example, boot another partition/OS) if/when you'd like. Jud To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message