Dual booting DragonFlyBSD with WinXP

[Chirag Kantharia <chirag@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

Has anybody setup a dual boot system with DragonFlyBSD and WinXP?

I have 3 primary partitions on my WinXP laptop; I installed
DragonFlyBSD on the third partition that is beyond 60G. I skipped the
step to install the boot blocks, since I want to use NTloader to boot
DragonFly. Later, I copied /boot/boot1 to c:\bootsect.dfly and added
the following entry to c:\boot.ini.

C:\bootsect.dfly="DragonFly"

FWIW, this method worked fine with FreeBSD-current. However, upon
trying to boot DragonFly from NT loader, the screen goes blank for a
few seconds, and then, the system reboots.

Upon googling, I found the following mail in the dragonflybsd-user
archive:
http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/dragonflybsd-user/2004/12/31/135686

I haven't come across mail/FAQ/webpage which confirms that the method
described above works for DragonFlyBSD.

I understand that, PC BIOS may not be able to read beyond 1024
cylinders. From my understanding of 'Packet mode' during boot blocks
installation, in course of installation, enabling it should help me
boot DragonFlyBSD even if the root partition is beyond 1024 cylinders.
Does enabling 'Packet mode' use a different second stage loader? What
magic does enabling 'Packet mode' do, which causes the boot loader to
use LBA addressing instead of CHS? Doesn't the default /boot/boot1 do
that already?


Thanks,


-- 
Chirag Kantharia
And all you touch and all you see, Is all your life will ever be.
                                -- Pink Floyd, Breathe