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Date:      Tue, 24 Jul 2007 09:47:55 +0930
From:      "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Cc:        Kris Moore <kris@pcbsd.com>
Subject:   Re: Issues with Bootloader & Vista
Message-ID:  <200707240948.04685.doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <46A4D8B1.3040706@pcbsd.com>
References:  <46A4D8B1.3040706@pcbsd.com>

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On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, Kris Moore wrote:
> We've released our 1.4 BETA of PC-BSD this week, and one of the
> issues which has come up is the broken support for dual-booting with
> a Vista system. Apparently the FreeBSD boot loader messes up some of
> Vista's boot process. Here's what one of our users tracked it down
> to:
>
> .....................................................................
>.. If a user wises to re size the Vista partition then dual boot the
> user maybe surprised to find Vista will fail to boot from the BSD
> boot loader with the following error message:
>
> "The file /Windows/system32/winload.exe can not be found or is
> corrupt."
>
> This is due to the BSD boot loader overwriting a UUID in the MBR the
> Vista OS uses to boot for some reason as it was not in the Beta or
> the RC.
> .....................................................................

I think this is similar to the signature bytes Windows XP uses to=20
remember which disk is which.

I was bitten recently when I reinstalled XP on my laptop - the installer=20
picked E: (NFI why since it was the first partition on the disk) and=20
after I reinstalled the FreeBSD MBR it decided it hadn't seen the disk=20
before and assigned it 'C' and so the swapfile location was invalid=20
which means you can't login (even in safe mode)..

I think the solution would be to ensure the 4 bytes it uses are=20
preserved by boot0cfg (although I think sysinstall would need=20
modification too), this page shows the bytes in question.. =20
http://www.multibooters.co.uk/mbr.html

I dunno if boot0 has 4 bytes to spare tho :(

=2D-=20
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C

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