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

On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 22:10, Andrew Boothman wrote:
> 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.

This sounds promising.  If you don't mind my asking, what steps did you
follow exactly?  I've never used grub before and I'd like to avoid
reversing my current situation (having a bootable Windows installation,
but suddenly rendering my FreeBSD install unreachable).

Thanks,
Scott