According to Claude Marinier:
>
>1) One of you could convince me that it is safe to install a boot selector
>   on the first disk. It would have to be free (preferably, one of the
>   boot selectors from the NetBSD distribution). I am not convinced this
>   is safe and am suspicious of WinNT (especially since I am running the
>   Windows 2000 Beta 3).
>

I _used_ to have exactly this sort of set up except I was using NT4
and my NT disk was in an external enclosure.  Most of the time I just
left the NT disk off and the bios booted from the second disk - ah the
joys of scsi :-)  For the occaisions where I wanted both disks on I
installed a thing called booteasy on the NT partition.  This nifty
little freebie would write the correct magic into the NT bootloader
control file so you could boot other OS's.  It worked fine with NetBSD
and NT4.

>2) One of you could tell me how to make a boot floppy that will boot from
>   wd1a:netbsd by default.
>

You have to hack the bootloader code to do this.  In
/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/stand/biosboot hack devopen.c, in the function
devopen set biosdev to be 0x81 just before the return.  This is
dangerous to do - you should build a boot block, install it on a
floppy and then back out the change or else you will be back here
asking why the hell you netbsd only boots from wd1 ;-) Oh and by doing
this hack those boot blocks will _only_ boot wd1.  I had to resort to
this hack when I put a non-toshiba HD in my laptop, the bios would not
recognise the disk to load the boot block from it but the NetBSD boot
loader would read the HD quite happily so I just hacked the boot
loader to pretend the boot block came from the HD when it really came
from floppy - saved having to pay attention and hit space at the right
time...


-- 
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Brett Lymn, Computer Systems Administrator, British Aerospace Australia
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