Re: Dual booting FreeBSD and Win95

> On 08 Apr 2015, at 21:30, Ryan Stone <rysto32_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> No, this isn't a late April Fools joke. :(
> 
> I find myself in a situation where I need to integrate my employer's
> manufacturing process with a third-party OEM's process.  My employer's
> hardware tests are all FreeBSD-based while the OEM is Windows 95 based.  I
> need to come up with a way to integrate them together.
> 
> We're looking at dual-booting FreeBSD and Win95.  We're thinking of booting
> into Win95, the OEM can do their thing, switch to booting FreeBSD, run our
> tests and produce a .csv file with the results, and then boot back into
> Win95 for them to finish up.  Ideally we would like to switch the boot
> slice without human interaction.
> 
> I've been playing around with trying to set one only slice as active to
> make the loader boot it, but it appears that doesn't actually work.
> boot0cfg would cover half of the use case (switching from FreeBSD back to
> Win95), but I'm not sure how I could do the original switch from Win95 to
> FreeBSD.
> 
> We've discussed just switching hard drives, but we really want to shoot for
> a 100% automated process.  Anybody have any ideas?

What are you testing? The hardware this is running on? Your tests as well as the OEM's?

If not I would suggest booting FreeBSD and running win95 in qemu.

A long time ago I dual booted BSD and DOS (or maybe it was OS/2 and Linux, it's been quite a while) and I did so by using two primary partitions, only marking one of them active/bootable at a time. You might be able to do the same in an automated way on windows and FreeBSD to alternate between the OSes.

- Michael


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