Booting FreeBSD-5.3 from NTLDR

[Rakhesh Sasidharan]

Hi,

Are there any issues in booting FreeBSD using NTLDR? My machine has
Windows XP, Fedora Core 3, and FreeBSD-5.3, and while I know I can use
GRUB to boot FreeBSD, I want to try booting it using NTLDR. Just for
kicks -- its something I haven't tried so far. :))

My ad0 disk has WinXP (and NTLDR), while ad1 has FreeBSD. I tried the
usual suggestions of extracting the first 512 bytes of "/dev/ad1"
(using "dd") into a file and telling NTLDR to use that file for
booting. But it doesn't work. Then I tried extracting 512 bytes from
other locations like "/dev/ad1s1" and "/dev/ad1s1a" and "/dev/ad1s1c",
but to no avail. Finally I even tried copying over copying
"/boot/boot1" (and even "/boot/boot2" and "/boot/loader" coz I was at
my wits end) to a file, and telling NTLDR to use that file for booting
-- but again nada! Most of the times I'd get a "Boot Error" message,
while at other times nothing happens.

Searching around on Google, I found a post to freebsd-stable that asks
the same question
(http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-stable@freebsd.org/msg64950.html).
The reply given there was to use this program called BOOTPART (can be
run from Windows, it extracts the bootsector of any partition you
specify, which can then be used to boot into that partition using
NTLDR). Using that program does allow me extract the bootsectors of
the FreeBSD partition, and use that from NTLDR to boot into it -- but
I am still stumped -- how does this program manage to extract the
bootsectors, while "dd" is not? I've used the "dd" method to
successfully boot into Fedora Core 3 using NTLDR, so I know it
generally does the job.

Any suggestions folks? Is there some incompatibility thing with NTLDR,
or am I going wrong somewhere?

Thanks,
Rakhesh