Dual boot solution

K Wieland kwieland at wustl.edu
Wed Sep 21 11:10:46 PDT 2005


On Sep 21, 2005, at 12:22 PM, Gary W. Swearingen wrote:

> K Wieland <kwieland at wustl.edu> writes:
>
>> If anyone could add to this I would be interested.
>
> I suppose that you say
>
>> Even if you choose not to alter the MBR.
>
> because of the last install menu item below
>     { { "BootMgr",	"Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager",
>       { "Standard",	"Install a standard MBR (no boot manager)",
>       { "None",		"Leave the Master Boot Record untouched",
> (from src/release/sysinstall/menus.c)
>
> That last one is clearly misleading, even if it is in the context of
> picking a boot manager, because later "fdisk" operations are certainly
> able to change the MBR's primary partition table, including the
> "active" bits that gave you trouble.
>
> I'll try to get the menu items changed to something like:
>     { { "BootMgr",	"Install the FreeBSD interactive boot manager",
>       { "Standard",	"Install the FreeBSD non-interactive boot manager",
>       { "None",		"Don't Install any boot manager",
>
> If you'd like, you could file a formal PR about this (and CC me,
> please) and maybe someone will beat me to it.

I have never filed a PR, do you have a link for how to do that?

Like you mentioned, it is misleading to say the least!

The problem as I see it has a much larger scope:  On one hand, you want 
to make it easy for people to just install and go.  This would tend 
toward fewer options, more streamlined, automatically set the active 
bit for the freebsd, etc.  On the other hand, some people definitely 
need control over those issues.

Maybe a solution is to see if a partition is set as active after the 
sysinstall disk setup part.  If not, instead of defaulting to freebsd, 
ask?  Are these issues covered in the advanced installation?

I foresee this being a bigger and bigger problem as more people are 
enticed to try freebsd but want the familiarity of windows - leading to 
dual booting.  Basically, they can't/don't want to go cold turkey, 
which I can't blame them.

Is sysinstall simply unable to tell which partition is set as active?

Why couldn't sysinstall set the active bit to the other partition?

Thanks,

Kristopher



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