MS Vista vs FreeBSD's bootloader
Darren Pilgrim
phi at evilphi.com
Thu Jun 28 06:05:49 UTC 2007
Ivan Voras wrote:
> pfgshield-freebsd at yahoo.com wrote:
>>
>> FWIW, if you just got your new computer with Windows Vista
>> installed and were hoping to dual boot FreeBSD on it, let me tell
>> you that FreeBSD's bootloader will screw things up.
>>
>> vista doesn't like:
>> - bootloaders different than the one used by Vista.
>> - Making a non Vista partition active.
>
> I can confirm this - messing with the boot sector will make Vista
> unbootable, but it can be repaired with the installer (of course, you
> lose FreeBSD at that point). It seems Vista uses registry or some
> other binary format to store boot info (as opposed to WinXP which
> uses a text file...) and it protects the boot loader for "DRM"
> reasons.
This has been SOP at Microsoft for almost a decade. If you want to
dual-boot Windows, the solution is to use the established methods for
adding additional boot options to the built-in Windows boot-loader. For
Vista, this means using the BCDEdit command-line tool to manipulate the
Boot Configuration Data in the system registry rather than Notepad to
edit boot.ini.
BCDEdit and its options are detailed on MSDN:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa468636.aspx
A slightly more useful discussion of BCDedit on bsdforums.org:
http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?t=48405
It specifies Linux, but this is a tutorial for adding a non-Windows boot
option to the Vista Boot Manager:
http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/10/13/Using-Vista_2700_s-Boot-Manager-to-Boot-Linux-and-Dual-Booting-with-BitLocker-Protection-with-TPM-Support.aspx
--
Darren Pilgrim
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