On Tue, 20 Feb 1996 01:26:54 +1100 (EST)  darrenr@cyber.com.au wrote:
> 
> I'm attempting to make a multi-boot pc with freebsd & netbsd.
> 
> Unfortunately, having done freebsd first, I can't seem to make
> the inst-11.fs floppy work :-(

This isn't going to work; well not the way you envision anyway.  All
the *BSDs use the same OS id in the partition table on the i386 (last I
looked anyway).  One of them would have to be modified to coexist with
the others if you want to do it via a OS boot selector.

However, assuming that Net boot blocks can load a Free kernel (or
vice versa), you could load both OSs (with some minor trickery)
and be able to select the one of choice at the boot blocks.  This seems
like a pain to me tho...

> Btw, nothing is mentioned about ATAPI CD-ROMs being supported, so
> I presume they aren't for installation ?

There is a patch set and a driver out there (check the mailing list
archives).  Never used it myself, but I hear it works :-)

> On a comparison note, the FreeBSD boot manager seems to be the best
> I've used yet.  It supports chaining of boot records, so I can boot
> of my second IDE drive (:-), including boot into Solaris2 x86 (ugh,
> getting this on was _painful_: RPL boot server on another 2.5
> box and install via nfs from another sunos4 boxen).

Is FreeBSD still using a modified copy of Boot-Easy?  If so and you
install *BSD on the 2nd hard disk without a DOS style partition
table (and skip the 1st track), Boot-Easy has been known to eat
the disklabel on some people machines (Hi Kev & Andy!).  At any rate
care should be exercised when playing with a boot manager.

> However, the best fdisk program I've used (interactively, from a
> shell prompt) is Linux's, unless there is some magic unknown to

I once tried to use Linux's fdisk program to create *BSD partitions.  I
learned a very painful lesson.  Someone was kind enough to point out
to me that pfdisk.exe is very nice if you have DOS laying around.  Never
used *BSD's fdisk for anythign other than checking the MBR...

> Now, if only I could use the best OS :-(

Hang in there; you'll get it! :-)