Re: Dual-boot with Windows - easy

["Valeriy E. Ushakov" <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 13:16:56 +0100, Stephen Borrill wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 13:06:44 +0200, Martin Husemann wrote:
> >
> >>On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 11:18:37AM +0100, Stephen Borrill wrote:
> >
> >>>Because of how much easier this is than the method in [1] above, I'm
> >>>tempted to just wipe out the whole entry in the FAQ and replace it by a
> >>>tidied up version of the above.
> >>>
> >>>Any dissent?
> >>
> >>Yes, I disagree. The FAQ should be updated to modern installboot
> >>features though. You can create the "bootsectors" by dd'ing 512
> >>bytes from /dev/zero and running installboot on them - this (at
> >>least to me) seems easier then getting some third party bootloader.
> 
> OK. I've never got the method in there to work (it's not reassuring that 
> it refers to a) NT only and b) bootblocks that won't work in NetBSD 1.4 or 
> later), but I'll have another go out of interest. The advantage of using 
> grub is that you can load the kernel from NTFS (libsa doesn't grok
> NTFS).
>
> >Or just use BootPart http://www.winimage.com/bootpart.htm that
> >automates the steps outlined in the FAQ for you.
> 
> It's not that automatic...
> 
> With the grub mechanism I like that it can be installed from NetBSD
> (with fuse-ntfs-3g) without having to do anything from Windows.

But why would you want to load the kernel from NTFS, going through the
hassle of copying the kernel to NTFS each time you build a new one?

E.g. I use hdd caddy with my company notebook (windows xp on the
primary hdd) to run netbsd on the second disk.  I just ran bootpart
once to create an ntldr boot menu entry for the second disk with
netbsd and I can completely ingore the fact that the machine is dual
boot from then on, I just install new netbsd kernel as usual, in its
usual location of /netbsd and that's it.  I can have test kernels
lying around / too and for all practical purposes the machine behaves
exactly if as it was netbsd-only, standard bootblock that you can use
to select a different kernel, specify options to the kernel, etc. 

You do fresh netbsd install as usual and just tell sysinst not to
touch the mbr to leave the windows boot code alone.  Then you run
BootPart from windows and you are set.  You don't need to mess with
bootsectors at all (no /dev/zero + installboot dances).

BootPart works for anything from NT4 onwards.  BootPart doesn't care
about what is it adding to the boot menu - I used it to boot other
oses too.  It just does for you the job of grabbing the first 512
bytes into a file and generating an ntldr boot menu entry and ntldr
happily chainloads it.

One can, if one wants, do the dd step on netbsd, copy the trampoline
over to the windows manually and manually add the boot menu entry
(will have to figure out that multi/disk/rdisk/partition syntax).

As Martin said, the FAQ entry just needs to be updated.

SY, Uwe
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