Boot and MBR.

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> I've got my primary drive divided in two partitions, one partition had
> WindowsXP and the other has FreeBSD 5.1-Release on it. I had WindowsXP
> installed and working until I put FreeBSD on the second partition and
> had it take control of the MBR. I know that the other partition is still
> bootable if I can get a pointer to it, currently the boot menu shows it
> as:
>   F!: ??
>   F2: FreeBSD
> How can I get that first menu choice to look at the installation on the
> first partition as bootable? Making the machine a dual boot between the
> two system?

The fact that it displays ?? is only a cosmetic problem.
Have you tried selecting F1 to see if it will boot the XP slice?   
Mine does.

Also, a side issue, in FreeBSD land, what you have is a disk
with tw0 'slices' as apposed to partitions.   Probably you have
your FreeBSD slice divided up in to several 'partitions'.   MS calls
the primary divisions of a disk partitions, but in BSD UNIX land they
are called slices.

> The second question I have, is can I put the command startx into my
> rc.conf file to have it boot directly into the x-server? Any help on
> these two would be awesome. Thanks.

I have not been successfule with that sort of thing.   Anyway, I 
don't think just putting it in rc.conf would do the trick because 
that just sets a bunch of variables in there.  Then the stuff is
actually run from rc (and some other places I think) using those 
variable values set in /etc/defaults/rc.conf and /etc/rc.conf..

I think you might not want your startx to fire off until after
you log in anyway.    That would mean putting it in .login (if 
you have a csh or tcsh shell)  and that is what didn't work
for me, though I didn't try many variations.

But, someone else better weigh in on this.

////jerry

> 
> Res Ipsa Loquitor,
> Mark-Nathaniel Weisman
> Site Master
> Mystic1.net
> 
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