Booting FreeBSD-5.3 from NTLDR

[Rakhesh Sasidharan]

On Mon, 31 Jan 2005 11:33:59 +0000, Mark Ovens <marko at freebsd.org> wrote:
> I rewrote that section of the FAQ years ago (around FreeBSD 3.1!!)
> because the previous wording was unclear and I did _exactly_ what
> Rakhesh has done :-(

Ah! Glad to see I am not the only one. :))) Felt really goofy when I
read that this goofup that I did was clearly documented in the
handbook! Thankfully I had backups (I keep doing this sort of messups
every now and then :p) and so I wasn't too freaked out when I
discovered my entire partition table and boot sectors erased -- but it
wasn't a nice sight either. The thought of re-installing everything,
plus restoring from backups, yada yada yada ... thankfully I managed
to find a program for recovering the partitions.

> Caveat: Things have no doubt changed since then so it may now be
> possible to add FreeBSD to the NTLDR menu with FreeBSD on a different
> disk, but I've never investigated it as I am happy with the solution I use.

Actually, I know that I can very well use GRUB or BootEasy to do this
job. But I dunno, its this curiousity that has gotten over me -- to
explore NTLDR a bit more, and to see why I can't boot into FreeBSD
with it. If I had gotten a definitive answer that its *not* possible,
then I would have given up -- but as it is, nobody has said its not
possible, and added to that I can see if I extract the bootsectors
using a program like BootPart then things work, and so I am highly
curious why I can't get things working with conventional tools and
methods like "dd" etc! Guess if I get no answers, I'll just start
using BootEasy, but I'm curious why things dont work nevertheless. :))
And I'm all the more curious what changes BootPart makes to the
extracted bootsectors to make them work with NTLDR.

-- 
				-- Rakhesh
				   rax at rakhesh.com