Re: 5.1-RELEASE & Windows XP dual-boot issues

On Monday 30 June 2003 7:19 pm, Scott Reese wrote:
>
> Previously, I had a dual-boot setup with FreeBSD 5.0 and Windows XP.  I
> was using booteasy as the boot loader and I had no problem booting into
> either Windows or FreeBSD.  However, I found myself having to reinstall
> FreeBSD so I decided to go with 5.1-RELEASE.  As usual, I chose to use
> the FreeBSD boot loader on ad0 (the Windows drive) and to install a
> standard mbr on ad1 (the FreeBSD drive).  After the install, I was able
> to boot FreeBSD with no problems at all, but when I went to boot up
> Windows, I received the dreaded 'NTLDR missing' message.
>
> So, to get the point, I was wondering if there was a way to make the
> Windows disk bootable again *without* having to reinstall Windows.  I
> know that if I reinstall Windows, it will think it's king of the
> universe and write over booteasy and thus make my FreeBSD installation
> unbootable.  I've tried searching google and the list archives, but,
> surprisingly enough (as I know there have been about a billion threads
> along this line), was unable to find anything useful.  Any advice or
> pointers on how to do this would be *greatly* appreciated.

This seems to be a recurring problem after 5-RELEASE. I had exactly the same 
problem, and I know of others that are the same. For some reason -current 
doesn't seem to be inter-operating well with the WinXP/Win2k loader anymore. 
I'm not sure if it's only happening to some installations - but I was 
certainly in the same boat.

I ended up having to re-install Win2k and I used Grub as my new bootloader.

Cheers.

Andrew.