Changing the booter options

[Dominic Mitchell]

On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 08:31:23AM +0100, Tim Wiser wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> At present, when my system boots up I get the following menu:
> 
>     F1  ???
>     F2  FreeBSD
> 
> Is it possible to change the F1 label to be "Windows XP", as that's my
> primary OS at the moment.

Probably not, because that particular boot loader only has 512 bytes to
operate in.  However, have a look at boot0cfg(8) and the source for
boot0.  Chances are that it just needs to be told about the newer
partition type that XP is using; it's probably only recognizing
FAT/FAT32 partitions.

However, you may prefer to use XP's boot loader (I assume it's the same
as winnt/win2k).  Look for a hidden file called boot.ini in the root of
your C: drive.  Copy /boot/boot1 to c:\bootsect.bsd somehow and add a
line to the boot.ini so that it looks like this:

--------[ boot.ini ]----------------------------------------------------
[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=C:\BOOTSECT.BSD
[operating systems]
C:\BOOTSECT.BSD="FreeBSD"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't bother changing the default line unless you want to boot into
FreeBSD by default.

This is all documented somewhere...  Aha, I knew I'd seen it somewhere:

    http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NT-BOOTLOADER

-Dom