Re: Dual-boot with Windows - easy

[Stephen Borrill <netbsd%precedence.co.uk@localhost>]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
[snip]
> > With the grub mechanism I like that it can be installed from NetBSD
> > (with fuse-ntfs-3g) without having to do anything from Windows.
>
> But why would you want to load the kernel from NTFS, going through the
> hassle of copying the kernel to NTFS each time you build a new one?

We have a NetBSD-based product that runs from a kernel with an embedded 
ramdisk. It then uses vnds for extra modular functionality. I don't need 
ffs filesystems anywhere (except the ramdisk!).

The ability of booting from NTFS means my installer can (using 
fuse-ntfs-3g) copy 1 file, create a suitable menu.lst and add a line to 
boot.ini without user intervention. It will then be self-contained for 
consumers without any partitioning or extra disks. The software is capable 
updating itself automatically and that procedure is filesystem agnostic.

I do agree that, in general, you don't want a kernel external to your 
running installation. In that case you can use an mbr_ext-based bootblock 
in boot.ini or use grub (assuming that they've not removed any ffs support 
from the grldr version...).

I'm setting up a test box to try all this and I'll update the FAQ to 
reflect modern usage.

[snip]
> One can, if one wants, do the dd step on netbsd, copy the trampoline
> over to the windows manually and manually add the boot menu entry
> (will have to figure out that multi/disk/rdisk/partition syntax).

Actually, just using C:\path seems to work in virtually all cases.

> As Martin said, the FAQ entry just needs to be updated.

I'm going to do that and add the grub info too.

--
Stephen