Date: Tue, 20 Apr 1999 21:44:55 -0400 From: Randall Hopper <aa8vb@ipass.net> To: Clem.Dye@wdr.com Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, kmc@best.com Subject: Booting FreeBSD, NT, and 98 (was Re: Boot to FreeBSD 3.1 on wd1 from NTLDR on wd0?) Message-ID: <19990420214455.A598@ipass.net> In-Reply-To: <H0000082019911e3@MHS>; from Clem.Dye@wdr.com on Tue, Apr 20, 1999 at 09:12:56AM %2B0100 References: <H0000082019911e3@MHS>
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Clem.Dye@wdr.com:
|If FreeBSD is going to live on a second drive (wd1/whatever) then it
|appears that you have to use the FBSD boot loader. The F? options
Well, not necessarily (in my experience at least). I have 2 versions of
FreeBSD, Windoze 98, Windoze NT, and DOS 7.0 all installed on my system.
They all exist happily with each other and I can multiboot between them.
(Win98 = games, WinNT = commercial app stability [stability in the
"Microsoft" dictionary; not in FreeBSD's], DOS for my old Quicken 8.0 and
hardware/memory testing tools, and FreeBSD for the other 97%.)
When I boot the first boot loader I see is OS/BS (2.0b8). OS/BS owns the
boot sector (and a few sectors after that). I configured it to present the
following options:
1) DOS / Win98 / WinNT
2) FreeBSD 3.0-RELEASE
3) FreeBSD 3.0-971208-SNAP
If I select DOS/Win98/WinNT, control is transfered to the boot record for
the little 1Gig DOS (FAT) partition at the front of wd0, invoking the NT
boot loader (NTLDR), which itself presents the following options:
1) WinNT 4.0
2) WinNT 4.0 (VGA Mode)
3) DOS/Win 98
If I select DOS/Win 98, I get the Win98 menu where I can pick which Win98
configuration I want or choose DOS-only mode (DOS 7).
That's 1-3 levels of menus (depending on selected OS) that I wish I could
reduce to 1 level. Microsoft's hack-n-slash boot procedure intentionally
makes this difficult, but it does work. At least FreeBSD is only 1 menu
away.
On my system, 3.0-RELEASE root lives on wd0s2a, and 3.0-971208-SNAP root is
on wd1s2a. Win98 is on E: (wd1s1), WinNT is on G: (wd1s5). I never played
games to get FreeBSD working on the second disk; it works with OSBS
out-of-the-box. Also, to my surprise the NTLDR conveniently situated
itself on the C: boot record (which you took advantage of too I see :-) and
not the master boot record since didn't let NT install itself on drive C:.
It took me a few tries to get the install right so everything plays nice.
But here is what I can recall:
- !! Build a DOS boot floppy with your tools (CDROM driver, OS/BS, etc.) !!
- Fdisk and format a small bootable DOS on a partition at the front of C:
(wd0s1).
- Simplify CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT down to a bare minimum.
(98 gets confused if you have anything non-trivial: multicfg boot menus,...)
- Fdisk and format a primary and an extended partition DOS partition on wd1
(wd1s1, wd1s5 to FreeBSD) - we'll install 98 and NT here
- Install FreeBSD (or FreeBSDs) wherever else you want.
- Install the OS/BS boot tool to multi-boot between DOS and the FreeBSD(s)
- Install NT4.0 to wd1's extended partition (G: in my case).
- Install 98 to wd1's primary partition (D: in my case).
98 is "NT-aware" and augments the NT boot loader menu
NOTE: NT may or may not overwrite your MBR (i.e. OSBS). 98 definitely will.
Just boot off the boot floppy and reinstall OSBS. No sweat.
Also note that the strings in these menus are all tweakeable (IIRC) so once
you get all your OSs booting as you like, you can change the menu names so
they make sense with what's going on.
Hope this helps. And as Clem said, please correct me if you know more
about the install process.
Randall
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