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Date:      Mon, 03 Sep 2001 18:24:00 +0200
From:      Stefan Hoffmeister <freebsd-ml@econos.de>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   How can I use the NT loader to boot FreeBSD?
Message-ID:  <mha7ptk5drrajbpjisdj9ruc3rakal6g8o@4ax.com>

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Hi, 

yes, I have read the FAQ at

  http://www.de.freebsd.org/FAQ/admin.html#NT-BOOTLOADER

but I guess I am too dense / nervous to grok it :-)

Some relevant information first:

Two SCSI hard disks:

  Disk 1:  System partition
           Windows 2000 boot partition (NTFS)

  Disk 2:  FreeBSD 4.3
           Linux swap
           Linux
           NTFS

Right now I am booting FreeBSD through the NT loader booting to LILO,
which is configured simply as

    other=/dev/sda1
            table=/dev/sda
            label=FreeBSD

so that it hands everything off to FreeBSD (yes, weird, but it works).

Now for my questions:

1.) "If FreeBSD is installed on the same disk as the NT boot partition"

Is the NT boot partition the partition that contains "ntldr", "boot.ini",
or is it the partition where NTOSKRNL.EXE is located, i.e. (in MS
terminology)

  multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINNT="W2K" /fastdetect

I suspect the former, but in my case this obviously does not matter.
Others might appreciate the clarification, though.

2.) "/boot/boot0 needs to be installed using sysinstall"

To which partition does it need to be installed? I assume that this is the
MBR of the *FreeBSD* disk (in my case disk 2), right?

3.) MBR + "active" flag fun

FWIW, all this talk about fiddling with the MBR and activating of
partitions by the FreeBSD boot loader makes me pretty nervous. I know that
by booting into DOS and issuing an "fdisk C: /mbr" with some fiddling of
active flags (where W2K apparently is pretty sensitive) I can make W2K
happy again. But it is a pain.

Ideally, there would be some kind of "passive" command that *only* updates
/boot/boot0, allowing me to copy /boot/boot0 to C:\FREEBSD.BS.

I don't want FreeBSD to ever write outside of its own "physical" partition
- and this includes that it should not write to any MBR of any disk at
all. If this can be accomplished at all, I'd appreciate hints :-)

The one thing I do like about LILO is that it is pretty obvious where it
writes to (aka "modifies data"): It is the boot sector referred to by
"boot=". And nowhere else.

Thoughts appreciated.

TIA,
Stefan

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