Tim Jakobsen wrote:

>Can the NetBSD boot selector be used to boot 2 different
>operatingsystems from 2 different harddisks ?
>
>  
>
I could not get it to work, plus I feared replacing XP's boot selector 
since it seems to somehow hook into XP's files, and I didn't know what 
kind of problems I might have made for myself if an XP patch messed with 
the boot portion of XP.  My solution was (did a little reading of the 
NetBSD manual and LOTS of archived e-mails) as follows.

I have an XP system using my entire C: drive.  I installed a 2nd 250G 
IDE drive, and installed NetBSD 2.1 Generic on the 2nd drive with the 
NetBSD boot selector and all.  My 2nd drive is on the 2nd IDE cable as 
the slave.  My CD drive is the primary on the 2nd cable.  I could not 
use the 1st cable at all because my machine is an IBM NetVista, and the 
1st cable does not have the connector for a 2nd device.

Of course, when I rebooted, the machine booted off the 1st drive, and XP 
came up.

Thats when I used a program called bootpart (search the web and you 
should find it).

Bootpart is a Windows tool that can grab the boot block from the 2nd 
drive, and make a file out of it for use by XP's boot menu.  Just 
install and run Bootpart and point it at your 2nd drive.  Bootpart will 
modify your XP boot selector, giving you the choice of booting with 
windows, or booting another using XP's boot selector.  Normally, you 
would be limited to additional OS's on the same C: drive, but bootpart 
lets you jump to a different drive.

However, I have yet to figure out how to read my C: drive from NetBSD.  
Every reference I have found thus far about reading NTFS hard drives 
requires that the NTFS partition reside on the same physical drive as 
NetBSD, and I do not wish to experiment with trying to create a NetBSD 
partition on my C: drive.  My work around is to use my USB flash drives 
to transfer files between systems.  Maybe someone has a solution for me??

Hope this helps.

Kenneth Freidank