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

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003 01:34:36 +0100, Andrew Boothman <andrew_at_cream.org> 
wrote:

> On Monday 30 June 2003 11:36 pm, Scott Reese wrote:
>> 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.
[grub stuff snipped]

A few comments about the thread so far:

ISTM the easiest thing for you to do is install booteasy on *both* drives.  
That should work fine.

I think Jesse Guardini's suggestion works when Win and FreeBSD are on the 
same drive.  You can still use the NT/2K/XP bootloader when the OSs are on 
different drives, but problem is, I could never figure out exactly what the 
FAQ was trying to tell me on that score.  You might take a look at the FAQ 
and see if it's clear to you.

Grub is a fine bootloader, but I've heard it doesn't like UFS2 filesystems, 
and I've also heard 5.1 uses UFS2 for / as default, causing grub not to 
work.  Is your / UFS1 or UFS2?  (Or to ask another way, did you upgrade via 
cvsup (resulting in UFS1 root) or install 5.1 from scratch (resulting in 
UFS2 root)?  If you can use grub and decide you'd like to do so, the 
"rootnoverify" line is no longer necessary with Win2K.

You may want to have a look at GAG, which is freeware, open source, 
graphical, and rather automagic.  Worked "out of the box" on my setup, 
which involves dual booting Win2K and FreeBSD from a RAID0 array.

Jud