Re: [Pcbsd-developer] bootloader

[Andrei K. <an...@bs...>]

On Friday 28 July 2006 12:11 pm, Charles A. Landemaine wrote:
> On 7/28/06, pcb...@li...
>
> <pcb...@li...> wrote:
> > Anyways, the FreeBSD bootloader is very good at what it does, however
> > it lacks a little feature which end users love, namely eye candy...
>
> That's fine. If some one can figure out how to add a background image
> and to boot linux partitions, let's stick to the FreeBSD bootloader :)

The current FreeBSD bootmanager is called 'boot0'. It has replaced booteasy 
(which was indeed used in the past).


The FreeBSD boot manager can be installed during the installation to allow you 
to boot multiple operating systems. After the install, the boot manager can 
be configured with the boot0cfg program.

boot0cfg is command-line driven. Fortunately, you probably do not need to be 
concerned with most of the options. There are a couple of options that you 
might be interested in, though.

boot0cfg -B will install the boot manager onto the hard disk's MBR. This is 
one way to restore the boot manager if Windows should wipe it out. Of course, 
you would have to boot from a FreeBSD boot disk to use this if the boot 
manager had been wiped out. In addition, if you wish to make changes to the 
boot manager configuration, you will need to reinstall it using this command, 
followed by the changes you wish to make.

-v	
boot0cfg will be more verbose about what it is doing.

-b image	
Where image is the name of the boot image to use. The default is /boot/boot0.

-d drive	
Where drive is the drive number used by the PC's BIOS for referencing the 
disk. Usually this is 0x80 for the first drive, 0x81 for the second, and so 
on.

-f file	
Where file is the name of a file that the original MBR should be backed up to 
in case there are problems. If the file already exists, it will be truncated.

The -o option is also supported and it contains a comma-separated list of 
options.

packet	
If the PC's BIOS supports it, this will tell boot0cfg to use int 0x13 
extensions instead of CHS for disk IO. This will get around the 1024 cylinder 
boot limit described previously. However, if the PC's BIOS does not support 
this option, it may cause the system to hang on the next reboot.

noupdate	
By default, the boot manager can write to the MBR and update it (to set the 
active flag, etc). This can cause problems if you have hardware antivirus 
support enabled that prevents writing to the MBR and such. The noupdate 
option will prevent the boot manager from attempting to write to the MBR.

boot0cfg also supports the -s n option, where n is a number from 1 to 5 that 
specifies the default slice (commonly referred to as partitions in 
MS-DOS/Windows) to boot if no selection is made. The -t n option is also 
supported, where n is a number representing the number of "ticks" to wait 
before booting the default operating system. There are approximately 18.2 
ticks in a second.

Here is patch for replacing DOS boot name with Windows...
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=1506483+0+archive/2005/freebsd-questions/20050612.freebsd-questions