Booting 5.3R on second disk using NTLDR (Impossible?)

[Aron Stansvik]

I did some in the comp.unix.bsd.freebsd news group, and I found some
people with the same problem. I'm suspecting that it is impossible to
boot FreeBSD by using NTLDR to load the FreeBSD boot sector from a
file when FreeBSD is placed on a second disk.

Can anyone confirm that this is the case? (the news group postings
were very old). And why is it so?

Thanks for any answers.

Aron

On Sat, 8 Jan 2005 11:56:09 +0100, Aron Stansvik <elvstone at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I've been struggling with a dual boot setup for the best part of two
> days here, and I'm not going to go outline the hazzles I've been
> through. This is where I am now:
> 
> ad0 = Windows XP Professional
> ad1 = FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE
> 
> Both OSs were installed from scratch, and ad0 and ad1 are set to
> master and slave respectively. No cable select. I did the installation
> in this order:
> 
> 1) Make sure ad0 is the only connected disk.
> 2) Install Windows XP Professional on it.
> 3) Make sure ad1 is the only connected disk.
> 3) Install a Standard FreeBSD installation.
> 
> This because I'm in a paranoid state by now, so I want to make sure
> Windows don't mess the FreeBSD disk up (and vice versa by user error).
> 
> During FreeBSD installation, I choose "Install a standard MBR (no boot
> manager)", I then booted the system with the kernel from the CD and
> the root from my new install, by doing boot -a and then specify
> ufs:ad1s1a as my root. When 5.3 was booted, I then did:
> 
> 1) dd if=/dev/ad1s1 of=/tmp/bootsect.bsd bs=512 count=1
> 2) scp /tmp/bootsect.bsd <other_host>:/tmp
> 3) Halt the system
> 4) Connect ad0
> 5) Boot Windows XP
> 6) scp <other_host>:/tmp/bootsect.bsd c:\
> 7) Append this to c:\boot.ini:
>        c:\bootsect.bsd = "FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE"
> 8) Reboot and choose "FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE" at the NTLDR boot menu
> 9) "Boot error"
> 
> Anyone know what I've done wrong? I've followed the short instructions at:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NT-BOOTLOADER
> 
> and I've Googled and read both boot(8) and boot0cfg(8) to look for
> something that I've done wrong or something that could help me get
> this to work.
> 
> It was a long time since I set up a dual boot, but I need it this way
> because it's my parents new computer, and me and my brother want
> something else but Windows when we're there. I remember setting up
> NTLDR to boot Linux years ago, but then it was on the same disk.
> 
> Thanks a lot for any answers!
> 
> Best regards,
> Aron Stansvik
>