Set default boot (from Windows?)

Generally, the only times I reboot my system is when I'm switching from Win2k to FreeBSD. Since the default boot device is reset to whatever was last booted, it makes this difficult in one direction. In BSD, I have a short script that uses boot0cfg to set the default boot device to be the windows partition, then reboot. Is there any way to get similar functionality in Win2k trying to go to BSD next? Filesystems shouldn't matter, since it's only dealing with the MBR, each OS can see that equally well. It's just that Win2k doesn't know much about BSD's boot loader (does it have a name?).

I guess one option would be to put NTLDR back on (I'd rather not) and use something like BootPart to boot BSD from there. In theory, BSD should be able to alter the boot.ini on the NTFS partition to change the default (my initial NTFS write test failed, but docs claim it's possible).

AFAIK the boot loader remembers the last booted partition by marking it "active". You need a small windows tool to do the same. There should be freeware programs, if you know a little bit of C or another language, you can do it yourself. The partition table is in sector 0. (I take no responsibility if you destroy the partition table, make a backup to a (mounted) floppy disk first with "dd bs=512 count=1 if=/dev/ad0 of=/floppy/bootsect.bak" eg. and have your BSD installation CDs near your PC )

Check the output of fdisk from a DOS disk first to make sure ... I am not 100% confident on this.

M.

You know, I said "Windows partition" but I suppose "Windows drive" would be a bit more accurate. Primary Master is a single NTFS partition with Win2k on it and Primary Slave is entirely FreeBSD. Since the limit is one active partition per drive, I assume both are active (what 2k's disk manager tells me). Unless maybe when no partitions are active on the Primary Master, it goes to the second boot device...something to look into.

Thanks for your help. Although I have good recent backups, it's been too long since I've used C for anything low-level to start pecking away at my MBR jsut yet

From what I saw, yes, when BSD was set as default, the windows partition was not marked active. I was having problems finding a tool to set a partition as inactive in windows, but I finally came across MBR Wizard. From checking with fdisk, it definitely does what it states, but the bootloader didn't use it as a basis for setting the default, it keeps a record elsewhere. F1 was still the default and it was set as active upon booting to it, even though it wasn't active before.

I guess it doesn't bother me much anymore. If anyone else has other ideas, I'd love to hear them, but since I got X running on the TV, my need to reboot into windows has all but disappeared (I have intermittent sound issues I'm working on).