Dual boot solution

K Wieland kwieland at wustl.edu
Wed Sep 21 07:30:30 PDT 2005


All,

I have a dual boot setup with windows 2000 and freebsd 5.4 (amd64).  
Everything was set up using ntldr to dual boot so I could "learn" 
freebsd meanwhile my wife could still use the computer.  I recently 
wiped 5.4 and installed 6.0B4 and in the setup chose not to load any 
boot managers (NONE).  I finished installing, everything working fine.  
Until I rebooted.  Freebsd booted!  So, after googling (lots of 
misinformation) and trying many things, I thought I would post here to 
save some poor soul a repeat of the week I have had.

First, this is what worked: Boot into freebsd and changing the active 
partition back to the windows partition (if it is /dev/ad0) ala
fdisk /dev/ad0 -a
yes
1 (vs 2, the freebsd partition)
yes
reboot!

What didn't work:
1.  using sysinstall in freebsd to set the partition as active.  For 
some reason this gave an error.
2.  windows recovery CD, fixmdr, fixboot, fdisk /mbr, repair 
installation of windows 2000 (screwed up windows big time, btw!)

Apparently if you do not choose an active partition in sysinstall, it 
defaults to the freebsd partition.  Even if you choose not to alter the 
MBR.

I didn't have an error of ntdlr not found, it was just booting into 
freebsd right off the bat.  Also, some people solve this problem by 
reinstalling windows, which I am sure when you do this, it sets the 
install partition to be the active partition.

If anyone could add to this I would be interested.

Thanks,
Kristopher



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