MBR problem

[Kjell B.]

I just installed FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE (using the mini-install CD) on my
laptop which already had Win XP Home + Win XP Pro on it. During partition
definition I chose not to touch the MBR. (I wanted to make use of Windows
boot.ini for booting into FreeBSD.) Nevertheless, whenever I boot I get
directly to the FreeBSD boot menu where there's no option to boot Windows.

disk layout:
ad0s1: 31 MB DELL slice
ad0s2: 8001 MB Windows XP Home slice
ad0s3: 8510 MB extended DOS slice with three logical Win partitions (one of
them Windows XP Professional)
ad0s4: 2533 MB FreeBSD slice

I tried to restore the MBR using fixmbr from Windows Recovery Console. It
doesn't help. I claims it has overwritten the file, but I still get directly
into FreeBSD at boot.

I've tried setting ad0s2 and ad0s4 as bootable and then writing changes (W)
in FDISK partition editor in sysinstall. At the following choice of MBR, I
choose 'Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager'. I then get "ERROR: Unable to
write data to disk ad0!" followed by "Disk partition write returned an error
status!". The same result also if I choose 'Standard' or 'None' in the MBR
choice menu.

(Another weird thing in sysinstall -> fdisk: Positioning the cursor on any
of the slices and hitting F1 yields "Sorry! The slice file is not provided
on this particular floppy image". This indicates to me that something is
wrong with my installation, but what?)

Any hints on ways out of this?

Another question: In 5.2 there are two sysinstalls - /stand/sysinstall and
/usr/local/sbin/sysinstall whereas in 4.8 I only find /stand/sysinstall.
Which one should I use with 5.2 and what's the difference between them?

-- 
Kjell