Re: Another multibooting option for the FAQ

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 07:02:27PM -0400, Nick Holland wrote:
> John Danks wrote:
> > I just realized this one recently. Most modern BIOS allow you to press
> > a key on the POST screen and choose a boot device, even a specific
> > hard drive.
> 
> I question your use of "most"...
> a lot (maybe most) "build from component" systems, yes.
> Name brand hardware?  not sure at all about that.
> 
Case in point: dell machine at work. Can boot from device. Two disks inside
-> no such luck, cannot choose disk.

> I also really don't want to encourage multibooting.  People should
> really look at it as an advanced trick, but unfortunately the people
> most interested in multibooting are usually novice users wanting to
> "dabble" in OpenBSD.  Those are the LAST people who should be
> multibooting until they understand all the issues.  I warn about this
> in the first paragraph, but obviously people skip over that. :-/  The
> biggest legitimate use for multibooting in my mind (yeah, that's the
> qualifier that counts) is laptops, which generally only have one disk,
> and often have significant use for more than one OS.

Well, you *have* to have a way to convert people to OpenBSD. You're
certainly NOT going to get them to switch their machine directly (and
there are more and more laptops out there).

Fortunately, installing OpenBSD along with something else is mostly
no longer a dark art, now that it can boot from any place on the disk
(and also now that windows7 can shrink its partitions).