On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 09:05:23 -0800
"James Hartley" <jjhartley@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have searched some, but surprisingly little comes up.
> 
> What is required to ensure that the MBR is preserved when installing
> 4.0_RC4 to an empty partition on a system already with an operating
> system installed?
> 
> Thanks for any insight shared.

I recently built a new workstation. It dual boots windows XP (so that
my wife can run CAD apps) and NetBSD 4.0_RC4 (a general purpose
workstation for me).

I let netbsd control the MBR and used the dual boot capability of the netbsd MBR bootstrap to point to windows in the first partition and netbsd in the second partition.

I initially installed NetBSD and used sysinst to create an NTFS partition for windows. I then installed windows, and tried to use the windows dual boot thing to get NetBSD back, but without success.

If you have a netbsd partition on your disk you should be able to start at this step. Installing NetBSD on this machine only takes a couple of minutes so I did that again and this time paid attention to the bit where you can set up a menu to select an operating system partition from a list.

Now it dual boots perfectly. I had to use fdisk to change the default OS, even though I thought I had specified windows to be the default during netbsd installation. Apart from that it went very well.

My wife only notices netbsd in the sense that her cad workstation startup is five seconds slower, and I have a nice fvwm environment for serious work.
-- 
Michael Smith
Network Applications
www.netapps.com.au   | +61 (0) 416 062 898
Web Hosting          | Internet Services