booting into windows changes active partition on dualboot system

[Joel Rees]

> I have a dualboot system with freebsd 4.8 installed on the primary
> slice,

Why? Everything I've read says let MSWindows pretend it owns the drive.
If I had no special reason for having freeBSD in the first BIOS
partition, I sure wouldn't.

> and win2k installed on the secondary slice. The OS' were
> installed in this order. Ive installed many fbsd/win2k dualboot systems
> before [usually with windows as the primary slice, and bsd and the
> secondary], always using the fbsd boot manager, and never having any
> problems going between os's. 

I don't know how it is with freeBSD, but when I tried partitioning a
BIOS partition with the openBSD fdisk, MSW2k threw a hissy. Someone on
the openBSD list was kind enough to point out that the "unrecognized
attributes extensions" or some such error I was getting on my FAT
partition were signs of bad things to come, bad things that resulted
because MSW2k wants to enforce its own order on the BIOS partitions. 

Fortunately, that was a new install, so reformatting openBSD's (boot)
BIOS partition with MSW2k's tools was relatively painless. Now MSW2k is
happy because it thinks it controls the order of the partitions.

Like I say, I don't know how freeBSD interacts with MSWhine's whimsies,
but I sure wouldn't want MSWindows reordering my BIOS level partitions.

> However, on this system, as long as i boot
> into bsd all is fine. But when i boot into windows, the windows slice
> becomes the active slice, thus when i reboot, i cant access either
> slice. i have to boot off a fbsd cd, then rewrite the bootmanager
> [resetting the bsd slice to be the bootable slice]. The other option i
> have is to manually set the bsd partition as active, while still in bsd,
> then rebooting works fine.

I might suggest the NT bootloader, but that wouldn't fix the re-ordering
business. 

> I've never seen this problem before, and tho
> i accept it as a sign from the unix gods as which os i should use ;) i
> would still like eliminate this issue.

I think I would back up anything important and re-install with MSW2k in
the first partition, but maybe that's just me.

-- 
Joel Rees <joel at alpsgiken.gr.jp>