From owner-freebsd-doc Fri Jan 11 8:32:30 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from leo.pcisys.net (leo.pcisys.net [207.76.102.240]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D25FB37B404 for ; Fri, 11 Jan 2002 08:32:26 -0800 (PST) Received: from pcisys.net (dsl.ppp-216-229-33-4.den.pcisys.net [216.229.33.4] (may be forged)) by leo.pcisys.net (8.12.1/8.12.1) via ESMTP id g0BGWIpM025621 for ; Fri, 11 Jan 2002 09:32:23 -0700 (MST) env-from (bfd@pcisys.net) Message-ID: <3C3F13C0.6010608@pcisys.net> Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2002 09:33:04 -0700 From: BFD User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011126 Netscape6/6.2.1 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: doc@FreeBSD.org Subject: Regarding the FreeBSD Handbook -- Suggestion for 3rd edition Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Hello, I am very much impressed by the 2nd edition of the FreeBSD Handbook: it is at least one magnitude of order better than the first edition, and I think it was well worth the hard-earned money I squandered on it. There is however, one suggestion I would like to make regarding Section 7.3.1 MBR, /boot/boot0 (below): boot0 is very simple, since the program in the MBR can only be 512 bytes in size. If you have installed the FreeBSD MBR and have installed multiple operating systems on your hard disks then you will see a display similar to this one at boot time. Example 7-1. boot0 Screenshot F1 DOS F2 FreeBSD F3 Linux F4 ?? F5 Drive 1 Default: F2 Other operating systems, in particular Windows 95, have been known to overwrite an existing MBR with their own. If this happens to you, or you want to replace your existing MBR with the FreeBSD MBR then use the following command. # fdisk -B -b /boot/boot0 device Where device is the device that you boot from, such as ad0 for the first IDE disk, ad2 for the first IDE disk on a second IDE controller, da0 for the first SCSI disk, and so on. I believe that this section would be more useful if it went into more detail on how to handle a dual-boot system. While Example 7-1 shows that multiple boot selections can be made, there is no real explanation on how to do this. It strikes me that if examples were added to show how to get additional OS's into the boot loader that the section would be of greater use. One could postulate two examples: 1. The user adds a second OS, say Linux, to their hard drive, and wants to use the FreeBSD loader instead of LILO. 2. The user adds a second hard drive with another OS on it, and wants to user the FreeBSD loader on the first hard drive to choose between the two. Giving an explanation and the configuration that led to the listing in Example 7-1 would also be useful. This explanation could be incorporated into the on-line edition until the hard-copy came out. BFD P.S. I have a vested interest in this. I recently added a second hard drive to my system that has Linux on it and have been trying to figure out how to get FreeBSD on the first drive to add it to the loader so that I can dual-boot. So even if you chose to ignore my suggestion for the book, could you help with how to do this? < Pathetic whining noises follow > . To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message