*BSD News Article 56642


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From: pusateri@macbeth.cs.duke.edu (Thomas Pusateri)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: freebsd boot util
Date: 12 Dec 1995 14:07:41 -0500
Organization: Duke University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 19
Message-ID: <4akjtt$9oc@macbeth.cs.duke.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: macbeth.cs.duke.edu
Keywords: boot

I recently went through a boot sequence of 2.1-951104-SNAP, Windows 95,
and back to 2.1-951104-SNAP. I use the boot program installed from the
FreeBSD boot disk when labeling the disk.

This only happened once but when I went to boot 2.1-951104-SNAP after
windows, it said "Operating System not found". I then booted with the
boot diskette and used the fixit floppy to try and recover but had
no luck. The FreeBSD partition was someehow destroyed. It was still
in the fdisk partition table though.

My point is this, the auto select boot program installed with FreeBSD
seems to remember the last OS you booted and default to that. I'm
wondering if this isn't a little dangerous (constantly writing to the
boot block to save the last default). Is there a reason FreeBSD
decided to use this boot program as opposed to os-bs or something
else that doesn't write to the boot block each time?

Thanks,
Tom