Dual Booting -- Help Please!

From: Todd Ross (erythorban_at_gmail.com)
Date: 11/16/04 

Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 01:40:50 GMT

Howdy,

I've been trying to get a dual boot setup working for two solid days and
I'm just not making any progress. My goal is to get Windows 2000 to
co-exist with FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE with Windows getting 15 gig and
FreeBSD getting 25 gig of my single 40 gig drive. I've read through
pages and pages of mailing lists and newsgroup postings but they all
make it seem really trivial. It just isn't working for me.

I won't bore you with my previous iterations, but the latest attempt
looks like this:

1) Install FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE
   a) Choose standard install
   b) Fdisk complains about incorrect Geometry
     i) BIOS reports 1024/255/63, so that's what I enter in FreeBSD's
fdisk. FreeBSD reports a max drive size of ~8 gigs but will still
happily partition the full 40. Is that normal? I proceeded anyways.
   c) I choose to install the FreeBSD Boot Manager
   d) installation proceeds as normal
2) Install Windows 2000
   a) Format first partition as NTFS
   b) It warns me that it doesn't like other operating systems and that
it will have to change the "active partition" which will affect any
other installed operating systems. It advises that I can set it back
after installation.
   c) installation proceeds as normal

At this point, booting takes me into Windows 2000. No big deal, the
installation process warned me about this. I go into the Administrative
Tools/Disk Management utility and set the 2nd partition (FreeBSD) to the
active partition and reboot.

FreeBSD comes up, but the Boot Manager isn't working. No worries, I'll
just re-run /stand/sysinstall. Several sites I found told me that I can
open fdisk, (W)rite the partition table (even without making any
changes) and I'll be prompted to reinstall the Boot Manager. I, of
course, get prompted for the correct Geometry again, so I enter
1024/255/63. I get an error that it can't write to ad0. Nothing more
informative than that it failed. No suggestions on what to do next.

I also found a couple sites telling me that I could reinstall the Boot
Manager myself via a fdisk -B -b /boot/boot0 ad0 but it whines about the
Geometry again and I haven't found a way to correct it from the
command-line invocation of fdisk.

So, at this point I have Windows 2000 on the first 15 gig partition
which I've booted into a couple times before changing the active
partition back to FreeBSD which is installed on the second 25 gig
partition. When I reboot, I get FreeBSD which is okay, but I'd really
prefer to get the Boot Manager to choose between the OSes. All attempts
to reinstall the Boot Manager have failed. Can someone give me some
direction?

Thanks,

Todd Ross

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