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Date: Wed, 6 Aug 1997 07:50:54 -0400
From: Randall Hopper <rhh@ct.picker.com>
To: George Michaelson <ggm@connect.com.au>
Cc: current@freebsd.org, emulation@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: modifying boot mgrs FROM FREEBSD
References: <199708060151.LAA18687@broon.off.connect.com.au>
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George Michaelson:
 |So how can you tune the bootmgrs from within FreeBSD? Sure, lotsa recipes
 |to drop to DOS and run <widget> but given the damn thing is actually
 |written by sysinstall (albiet via weird magic in wizards.c returning hex
 |in structs) there really should be a way to tweak/frob from inside Unix
 |and modify the 1-2 bits needed to flag what the preferred booting option is.

One thing you might look at is running these DOS multiboot utilities in
FreeBSD inside PCEmu or DOSCMD.  If the bootmanager uses the BIOS to do all
its reading and writing, and if those ISRs are emulated correctly, it just
might work.

Caveat: Note that I haven't tried this nor heard of anyone that has (...but
now that the thought's occurred to me, I'll put it on my list :-).

I'd definitely try this first with a small file hard disk image inside a
UFS (when not running as root and with the normal, restricting permissions
on your /dev files), but if it appears to work successfully, if your system
is backed up, and if you don't mind living on the edge, point C: at your
raw wd0 or sd0 and give it a shot.

(I'm Ccing emulation because I really don't know much about doscmd or
pcemu's capabilities and limitations -- just started working with them a
few days ago ... so please allow time for some of the experts to follow-up
before trying this).

Randall Hopper