Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 13:56:37 +0100 From: "Paul Moore" <gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk> To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>, <freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org> Subject: Booting FreeBSD from floppy (ie, without a bootloader on the hard disk) Message-ID: <LPBBKGDEHNMONLBODEOHAEDACCAA.gustav@morpheus.demon.co.uk>
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Hi, I'm a total newbie to FreeBSD - I've used Linux before, and I thought I'd check out the "opposition" :-) As I'm just trying things out, I wanted to install FreeBSD onto my second hard disk, leaving my existing setup on hard disk 1 totally untouched. Specifically, I don't at this stage want to change the existing (NT) bootloader on the main disk. I have installed FreeBSD on my second disk, and selected the option for no bootloader. This worked fine, but I now seem to have no way of getting into FreeBSD. I assume that I need to create a boot floppy which will start FreeBSD off the hard disk. There was no option I could see in the install process to do this (I used the "novice" install type), and I can find nothing on the subject in the manual. Can anyone give me a step-by-step explanation of what I need to do? (As I say, I'm not new to Unix, but I have no experience with FreeBSD). Further down the line, I'd like to add FreeBSD as an option to my NT bootloader (I do not want to switch bootloaders, even if the FreeBSD one is better...). To do this, I should only need a suitable MBR image which I can store in a file on the NT boot drive, and I can then change NT's BOOT.INI to add FreeBSD. For later reference, can anyone tell me how I get a FreeBSD MBR? (On Linux, I install the Linux MBR on the Linux disk instead of the boot disk, and then peel it off using dd - is there an option to do this with FreeBSD?) Thanks for any help, Paul Moore. PS In case I didn't make it clear, my key requirement is to make no change at all to my existing NT disk - I want to isolate all my FreeBSD work to the second disk (at least for now). To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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