Just an hour ago i installed the latest freebsd on my hd, along with xp. What i did was deleted my previous slackware partition, and told the freebsd setup to partition the free space as it needed. Somewhere in the setup it asked me if i wanted a boot loader. I specifically remember saying ___NO___ to this, just in case i needed to go into xp. But what do ya know, there is boot loader with the freebsd devil when my comp starts.

So i thought, "Easy fix, just boot up the xp cd and do 'fixmbr'". Its still there after the reboot!! This is really bad because there is an important spreadsheet i need off of XP. Has anyone ever experienced this problem with installing freebsd and xp on the same disk? What can i do to get back on my xp partition, or to get this file. Right now I'm on a live cd, and it mounted all of the partitions, but when i 'cd /mnt/hda1', 'ls', nothing is there! Blank partition. That happens for all of the drives it lists (about 8 paritions, most are from freebsd). I will try one more live boot cd to see if it can mount my xp parition.

Please, i need some help, big time.

Note: i know files are still on the xp parition because i can view files on the hd with recovery console. Maybe i can copy the file to a floppy with RC?

Thanks,
Wes

Update: i got the stupid spreadsheet off of XP. Turns out it was a problem with p.h.l.a.k. displaying my partitions correctly, because knoppix did it fine. So i have the file, now to fix the problem.

Here's the plan:
1) put away bsd disks until i'm comfortable with loosing access to my XP partition
2) boot up slackware install, delete all freebsd partitions, install slackware, INSTALL lilo (because i know fixmbr has no prob with removing lilo. This way, at least, lilo will detect i have XP on the disk and add it to the menu).
3) Boot up xp disk, fixmbr, relax and enjoy slackware and xp

I'll post a follow up.

Follow up: The plan worked out well. Got the freebsd partitions cleaned up, reinstalled slackware, and I added windows to lilo with the slack utility thing. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone if they run into the same type of problem.

choosing no installs the standard boot record. Choosing yes installs the boot manager. Choosing leave the MBR alone doesn't do anything

Hmmm, I'll keep that in mind the next time I install it. Thanks.