On Tue, 24 Jul 2007, Kris Moore wrote: > We've released our 1.4 BETA of PC-BSD this week, and one of the > issues which has come up is the broken support for dual-booting with > a Vista system. Apparently the FreeBSD boot loader messes up some of > Vista's boot process. Here's what one of our users tracked it down > to: > > ..................................................................... >.. If a user wises to re size the Vista partition then dual boot the > user maybe surprised to find Vista will fail to boot from the BSD > boot loader with the following error message: > > "The file /Windows/system32/winload.exe can not be found or is > corrupt." > > This is due to the BSD boot loader overwriting a UUID in the MBR the > Vista OS uses to boot for some reason as it was not in the Beta or > the RC. > .....................................................................
I think this is similar to the signature bytes Windows XP uses to remember which disk is which. I was bitten recently when I reinstalled XP on my laptop - the installer picked E: (NFI why since it was the first partition on the disk) and after I reinstalled the FreeBSD MBR it decided it hadn't seen the disk before and assigned it 'C' and so the swapfile location was invalid which means you can't login (even in safe mode).. I think the solution would be to ensure the 4 bytes it uses are preserved by boot0cfg (although I think sysinstall would need modification too), this page shows the bytes in question.. http://www.multibooters.co.uk/mbr.html I dunno if boot0 has 4 bytes to spare tho :( -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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