Ok so currently I have XP and Slack booting on my laptop, the next two goals will be FreeBSD and Windows Server 2003, in that order (though I may need to start over and do server before unix/linux.

Either way, how I got linux interacting nicely with XP was via this link:

http://bratlady.com/linux_boot.shtml

One of the catches is I am using the Windows Boot manager, so the key to getting linux to work was this part of the deal:

dd if=/dev/hdc2 of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1

Which I sorta went with, I have no idea what the file it creates really does nor even what the command itself executes, I know what they tell me on that site "rip the bootsector from our Linux root partition", so thats easy to understand right?

So now I suppose the question is, how do I accomplish the same thing with FreeBSD 5.3 so I can just plug the file into the windows boot loader and get it booting to it correctly?

Thanks,

J

There are a few options:
1. Continue to use Windows Boot Manager (ntldr). However, it's probably not a very good idea because Windows Server 2003 might start complaining. But if you want to try, take a look at this.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...#NT-BOOTLOADER

If the FreeBSD installation is on the same hard disk with Windows, copy /boot/boot1 to your windows partition. You can rename the file if you want to. Then put C:\BOOTSECT.BSD="FreeBSD" into boot.ini. However, if you have it on a different disk **DO NOT** use /boot/boot1 or /boot/boot0. This would wipe out the partition table in your hard disk. I had accidentally done it before and I wasn't able to recover the partitions. Instead you can do:

# dd if=/dev/ad?s?? of=/bootsect.bsd bs=512 count=1

Change ad?s?? to the appropriate device node. The device for the first hard disk, first partition, first slice (FreeBSD partition scheme), is ad0s1a. Then modify boot.ini, and it should work. This command copies the first 512-byte block from the device you specified to the output file (in this case bootsect.bsd).

2. Use your BIOS. Some computer has BIOS that allows you to choose what device to boot after POST.

3. Use the default FreeBSD bootloader. However, the bootloader will display ??? for ntfs partitions.

4. Use GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader).

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/

If you want to install it through FreeBSD, download the precompiled package from the FreeBSD ftp site. It's under the sysutils category. Use pkg_add to install the package and configure the loader. Documentation is on the GRUB web site. In my opion, this is the best way. Windows won't complain it's not the only OS on the computer, and it can boot almost any OS through chain loading. Also, it provides a very nice screen at start up and very flexible.

If you have any questions, just post it to this thread.
I hope this helps you. Good Luck!

Enoch