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Old 28th May 2008
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robbak robbak is offline
Real Name: Robert Backhaus
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The FreeBSD Boot manager (the bootloader is a different beast that ocours just before the kernel is loaded) is very simple, and is this way by design. FreeBSD's boot Manager is contained within the MBR (Master Boot Record of "Boot Sector"- most others use a boot sector to simply locate and call another executable stored elsewhere.

While this makes FreeBSD's more robust - You can wipe and replace all partitions on a drive without killing it - it does mean that the space for the boot manager is very limited - 446 Bytes to be precise - So it cannot be very intelligent. I hope you will now understand why this step seems so primitive.

However, you can configure it, using the boot0cfg program. From my reading of man boot0cfg(8), it is limited. You can usethis command to set the default boot slice for the next boot:
Code:
boot0cfg -s3
. This should set the third slice (the third entry in the boot list) to be the default. The man page seems to suggest that this is only for the next boot, and default-to-last takes over from there: Other references suggest that this does set a default, but, significantly, there is no command mentioned to unset a default. Note that this is soley from reading the man page - I have not tried it, or read it anywhere.

If that fails, your options are to let well enough alone, or install some other, more complex boot loader, like grub or lilo, which are all-singing and dancing boot loaders. There are even fully graphical boot loaders for true WIMPs.

edit: thanks tuck! try
Code:
boot0cfg -s 4 -o noupdate
should set the default permanently, and
Code:
boot0cfg -o update
should set it back to default-to-last.
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Last edited by robbak; 28th May 2008 at 11:41 PM.
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