problem with dual disk/ dual boot installation

[RW]

On Fri, 30 Nov 2007 18:56:34 +0100
Joerg van den Hoff <j.van_den_hoff at fzd.de> wrote:

> dear list,
> 
> today  I've  tried  a  very first installation of 6.2 on the
> second  disk  of  an  i86  machine  which  runs  windows  xp
> professional 2002 service pack 2 on disk one.
> 
> initially,  I  erroneously  did _not_ select installation of
> the boot manager on the first disk (were  windows  resides),
> but only on the second (the BSD one).
> 
> after  the  intallation  was  completed without any apparent
> problems I noted my mistake (well, the machine  was  booting
> windows  ...)  

That setup sounds OK if you set the bios to boot the second drive,
instead of the first. 

The FreeBSD boot-manager is very basic, it can only boot a local
partition or chainload another drive, which is why you often need a
copy on each disk. In your case Windows will chainload directly, since
you have a standard MBR on the first drive. Your problem is that the
bios is not booting into the drive with manager on it.