MBR problem

[Ryan Merrick]

Kjell B. wrote:
> Kjell B. wrote:
> 
>>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?
> 
> 
> OK, I did find a hint Googling a little more.
> 
> Apparently GEOM prevents me from using sysinstall on the installation for
> changing MBR. I need to use the install CD and run sysinstall from there.
> Then I could do the change of MBR and got the standard FreeBSD boot manager.
> I now can boot Win XP or FreeBSD using the standard FreeBSD boot manager.
> What remains is to get rid of that and use Windows boot.ini for choosing
> between Win XP and FreeBSD, i.e. overwrite the MBR using fixmbr.
> 
Hello,

I have use to do this with win2k. The trick I used to boot into windows was 
to used fdisk -a from freebsd and switch the active partition to the one I 
wanted to boot. Then to get back to freebsd I would use the manage disk 
volumes(?) for win2k to set the freebsd partition active and reboot.


-- 
-Ryan Merrick
sandshrimp at comcast.net