On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 09:34:16PM -0400, Daniel Dickman wrote: > On 5/31/07, James Hartley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >Section 4.8 of the FAQ discusses how to capture the PBR for multibooting > >with dd: > > > ># dd if=/dev/rwd0a of=openbsd.pbr bs=512 count=1 > > > >Two questions. > > > >* For stand-alone installations, is the PBR the same thing as the MBR? > > > >* More importantly, how can I use dd to access the MBR in a multibooted > >system of Vista & OpenBSD? > > > >Thanks for any insight. > > > > > > I can only guess your end goal is to be able to multiboot Vista and > OpenBSD. That's the setup I have on my machine. It's a little tricky, > but here's basically how I did it: > > 1) install Vista on a primary partition first. > 2) install OpenBSD on another primary partition, make sure to keep the > Vista MBR though. (in another words be careful what you're doing > during the fdisk stage of OBSD installation). > > At this point you have both OS's on your machine but can only boot > into Vista. So now: > 1) Use windows dd from Vista to copy the PBR from OpenBSD onto your > windows partition (This app can be found here: > http://www.chrysocome.net/downloads/dd-0.5.zip) > 2) Note one tricky thing here. When you open the Vista command console > to run dd you must right click and select "Run as administrator".
As an alternative you can during installation create a third MSDOS partition formatted FAT32 to use to transfer the PBR. Create the file using dd during OpenBSD installation. Boot into Vista and fetch the PBR file from the MSDOS partition. Or use an external USB drive for the same purpose. Windowses has a history of being pecky about the MBR and it is generally safest to use Windows bootloader for multibooting. > 3) Use the Vista bcdedit command to set OpenBSD as a boot option under > Vista. Here's the best tutorial I've seen on the topic > (http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?t=48405). > > Note that if you don't know what you're doing you can very easily lose > ALL your data with the smallest of mistakes, so be sure not to try > this on a machine that has data you care about unless you have > everything you need backup up. > > Enjoy. -- / Raimo Niskanen, Erlang/OTP, Ericsson AB
