Another question - Boot Menu

[Jud]

On Mon, 06 Oct 2003 15:48:16 -0400, Timothy Luoma <luomat at peak.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Oct 2003 12:24:07 -0700 (PDT), Ronnie Clark  
> <ronj_clark at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> How does one edit the menu options when using the
>> FreeBSD boot menu to dual boot with Windows? Currently
>> mine says:
>> F1: ???
>> F2: FreeBSD
>>
>> I searched the archives, but did not find my answer.
>
> I believe that is just what it says when it runs into a NTFS partition.
>
> I'm running http://gag.sourceforge.net/ on my system and found it quite  
> easy to use and also easy to switch which is the default, etc.

Points for searching the archives, but in this case it's an FAQ.  :)  The  
bootloader will work even though it just shows question marks.  "???" is  
what it says when it runs into a filesystem that might be NTFS, or it  
might be OS/2's HPFS filesystem, or even QNX - they all share a filesystem  
ID number of 7.  Other bootloaders such as the NT/XP bootloader, Grub,  
GAG, etc., are multi-part: one piece lives in the boot sector (which is  
quite small) and does the booting, and another, larger bit allows you to  
configure cool stuff like graphics, labels, etc.  FreeBSD's bootloader  
just has the small bit that does the booting.  If you want something other  
than question marks, you can hack the bootloader source (I've never tried  
and don't know what's involved) or use one of the other available  
bootloaders, several of which have been mentioned in this thread.  The  
NT/XP loader you already have; GAG is easy and (because it works with  
RAID) is the one I use ATM; Grub is very configurable and its  
documentation is useful to learn about bootloaders and the way they work.

Jud