# XP & FreeBSD on 2 drives. ? in boot menu



## Const (May 14, 2009)

Hello!

I have 2 hard disks. First and 1 half of the second for two Windows XP (don't ask me why I have two of them lol), both set on first drive, and the last half of the second for FreeBSD. During FreeBSD installation I've put BootMgr to the both disks (like it's said in manual if I'm not mistaken). After installation my boot menu looks like this

```
F1 ?
F2 ?
F3 Drive1
```
I can start FreeBSD choosing Drive1 and then FreeBSD from the next menu. But pressing F1 give me only "NTLOADER is missing" (or something like that) message. I had FreeBSD-7.1-RELEASE installed before and it worked like a charm. The menu looked this

```
F1 DOS
F2 Drive1
```
Googling, yahooing, rtfming and meditating bring me to the conclusion that I've got the problem that should be fixed in 7.2 version

```
The boot(8) now supports 4-byte volume ID that certain versions of WindowsÂ® put into the MBR
```
Though the fact that it worked on 7.1 (where it wasn't fixed yet) and doesn't work on 7.2 (where it's fixed) make me doubt. Could anyone give me a possible solution or point in the right direction?


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## Const (May 15, 2009)

Hm... Looks like the problem has gone but I don't understand why  Now the menu still looks the same with ? in it but pressing 'F1' load WindowsXP. I've made few changes at that time and can't say 100% sure what of them fixed the loader

I was meditating about boot0cfg command and -i key. Trying different ways to make it work and getting "boot0cfg: incompatible boot block, cannot set volume ID" error every time. Then I've used

```
boot0cfg -Bv ad8
```
where ad8 is my first HD with XP on it. That's gave me a small partition table with XP slices on it. I doubt -B key could fix anything since it's just loading FreeBSD boot manager to that HD (and it was already loaded there at that time). After that I've run sysinstall to look partitions and their types. On ad8 I've set XP slice as bootable (by pressing 'S' button on it). I'm sure it was done once before and didn't work... But after rebooting I've got the same menu and pressed 'F1' just for luck... and it worked

I'm too newbie in UNIX and FreeBSD. My first post was ignored as I see, guess because it was uninformative or was many-many times answered... Thanks anyway for creating and supporting this forum, got few nice hints here already


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## edhunter (May 16, 2009)

look at the boot.ini file on the winxp drive
there should be something like this

```
[noparse][operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS[/noparse]
```

try changing disk(0) to disk(1) or reverse

p.s. sorry it seems you fixed it..
ignore my post


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## Const (May 16, 2009)

I think I've found out what exactly fixed the problem. In fdisk utility (I've run it from sysinstall) it gave me a warning message about unproper disk Geometry and offered to try another. I've agreed and the new Geometry that was offered to me fixed the problem. So Geometry was the answer (still should read about what is Geometry and how it's fixed the problem). Hope it can be helpful to anyone


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