dual boot with freebsd boot loader

[Bob Johnson]

On 8/2/05, Petre Bandac <petre at kgb.ro> wrote:
> hello
> 
> I have the following configuration
> 
> ad0s1 - win xp with ntfs 
> ad0s2 - freebsd
> 
> they were installed in the above order, so now I can use only freebsd
> 
> is there a way to configure freebsd's boot loader to be able to boot
> from the win partition (I googled around and found boot0cfg (8), but
> didn't have the time to play with it)
> 

Yes.

> what I want to know is if (making a similarity with linux's lilo) I can
> make the boot loader to  have the options 1) boot win, 2) boot freebsd
> 
> I do not want to install grub or other boot loader unless the default
> freebsd boot manager cannot be used in the configuration described above
> 

If you install the FreeBSD bootmanager, it will do that by default,
but I usually
use the Windows boot manager.  There is a FAQ entry for it, see 
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NT-BOOTLOADER

It talks about Windows NT, but it works the same.

The FreeBSD boot manager will automatically boot you to the O/S that you 
last selected manually.  I believe the NT boot manager will always boot to 
the same default unless you manually intervene, but I may be remembering 
that wrong.

The NT boot loader is much prettier.

To get your system to boot to FreeBSD so you can make a copy of boot1, 
you may need to run Windows fdisk to set the FreeBSD partition to be the 
active partition.  Then use FreeBSD fdisk to change back to Windows so 
you can set it up.

- Bob

> thanks,
> 
> petre