> Please excuse if this has been mentioned, I'm not a regular subscriber
> to the list.
> 
> I'm attempting to make a multi-boot pc with freebsd & netbsd.
> 
> Unfortunately, having done freebsd first, I can't seem to make
> the inst-11.fs floppy work :-(

One quick suggestion: Both FreeBSD and NetBSD, AFAIK, use partition
type 0xA5 as their reserved partition type.  The FreeBSD boot blocks,
and I daresay the NetBSD ones as well, are rather simplistic and
simply stop at the first 0xA5 partition they find (though I'm also
somewhat pressed to suggest a better course of action - not enough
room in the boot blocks to present a menu :-).  This, of course,
causes problems if the OS you'd like to boot from is on the *second*
partition of type 0xA5.

> Btw, nothing is mentioned about ATAPI CD-ROMs being supported, so
> I presume they aren't for installation ?

For...  FreeBSD?  Yes, they're supported using a different boot image.
See the atapi.flp image instead of the boot.flp image.  For NetBSD?
I've no idea - I don't know if ATAPI support was compiled into the 1.1
GENERIC kernel since I've never actually installed NetBSD and don't
really follow its progress too closely (not out of spite, simply from
lack of time! :-( ).  I think the ATAPI support came post 1.1 anyway,
yes?

> On a comparison note, the FreeBSD boot manager seems to be the best
> I've used yet.  It supports chaining of boot records, so I can boot
> of my second IDE drive (:-), including boot into Solaris2 x86 (ugh,
> getting this on was _painful_: RPL boot server on another 2.5
> box and install via nfs from another sunos4 boxen).

This is actually BOOTEASY, and we install it by simply compiling its
bootstrap loader into the installation program and then copying it
out.  If the NetBSD installer doesn't have such an option then I can
only highly recommend it!  It's really easy to do and saves much
trouble.

> However, the best fdisk program I've used (interactively, from a
> shell prompt) is Linux's, unless there is some magic unknown to
> me about making freebsd's useful.

We're working on pulling all this out of sysinstall now, and hope to
at least _rival_ the Linux disk partitioning tools for ease of use - I
won't be so egotistical as to pretend that we're necessarily going to
exceed their mark, at least not for awhile yet.. :-)

Seriously, be it whatever variant of *BSD, this is one area which
causes the most troubles and definitely merits improvement all around.

						Jordan