Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 06 Sep 2002 06:20:53 -0400
From:      Jud <jud@myrealbox.com>
To:        BSD Freak <bsd-freak@mbox.com.au>, John Bleichert <syborg@stny.rr.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD boot loader menu
Message-ID:  <D97441PONIEA1LFYV426ZYXGBZUGCGE.3d788185@sparky>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0209052121470.25242-100000@janeway.vonbek.dhs.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
9/5/2002 9:24:05 PM, John Bleichert <syborg@stny.rr.com> wrote:

>On Fri, 6 Sep 2002, BSD Freak wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2002 11:20:58 +1000
>> From: BSD Freak <bsd-freak@mbox.com.au>
>> Subject: FreeBSD boot loader menu
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I have looked everywhere for info on 2 boot loader issues:
>> 
>> 1. I have a workstation that dual boots WinXP and FreeBSD. The 
boot menu
>> looks as follows:
>> 
>>     F1 ???
>>     F2 FreeBSD
>>        
>>     Default: F2
>> 
>> The F1 ??? is Windows XP. Is there any way I can change to look 
like:
>>     
>>     F1 WindowsXP
>>     F2 FreeBSD
>>        
>>     Default: F2
>> 
>
>I think this is because XP is an NTFS filesystem and the BSD boot 
loader 
>doesnt recognize it.  As far as I know, the bootloader gets its labels by 
>determining the filesystem type directly. The labels cant be easily 
>modified.

OS filesystems have numbers (don't know exactly what those numbers 
are called - perhaps someone can help here?).  For instance, the 
number for a FreeBSD partition is 165, and I think, though I'm not 
certain, that Linux and Linux swap are 83 and 82, respectively.  NTFS is 
7, but so is IBM OS/2's HPFS.  QNX may also be type 7, though I'm not 
sure of that.  Since there's more than one type 7, the bootloader can't 
apply a label to that boot entry automagically.  Other bootloaders get 
around this sort of problem by allowing users to apply their own labels to 
the boot menu entries.  Since the bootloader's space is quite limited and 
it has other more important jobs to do, allowing the space for a 
conveniently user-configurable boot listing in the FreeBSD boot loader 
wasn't a priority.

>
>Check out the GRUB bootloader. You may like it.

GRUB's great.  The only reason I don't still use it is that it doesn't happen 
to grok my RAID setup.  If you don't boot from a RAID array, I 
recommend it highly.  See /usr/ports/sysutils/grub.

Jud



To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?D97441PONIEA1LFYV426ZYXGBZUGCGE.3d788185>