I've just installed OpenBSD 4.5, first on an i386 system and then on an amd64 machine. Both installations are dual-boot with Windows XP. The i386 machine, which I worked on first, was pretty straightforward -- I made a grub boot floppy so I was able to boot the system after installation, installed the grub package, made the /grub/menu.lst file, ran grub-install and I was done.
When I proceeded to work on the amd64 system, after the OpenBSD installation I was a bit surprised to find that there is no grub package available for that architecture. I worked around it by copying (with tar) the /grub directory from the i386 machine to the amd64 system (which was up and running, courtesy the boot floppy). I was then able to write the mbr with the grub 'setup' command, issued from the grub command line after booting from the floppy and all was well. (Note that everything was done on the amd64 machine with the 32-bit version of grub. Works fine.) But if I hadn't had the i386 machine available, things would have been more complicated, though I'm sure ultimately solvable (i.e., by building grub from the source). I did consider using the multi-boot method involving ntldr suggested in the installation doc. But in my case, the mbr installed by Windows XP was long gone, because both systems were previously setup dual-boot with Windows and, first, Linux, and then FreeBSD. So, at the time of the OpenBSD install, what I had in the mbr was whatever FreeBSD puts there. I booted the XP CD to try to restore the mbr and ran into problems on both machines, the details of which I will spare you other than to note that it is, after all, The World's Most Annoying Operating System. So the documented method immediately presented problems in my case (yes, I'm sure I could have found a copy of the XP mbr somewhere on the network and could have dd'ed it to the disk). So, I'd like to ask why grub is apparently unsupported on the amd64 architecture? And I would suggest that grub provides a simple solution to dual-booting OpenBSD on a system that had been previously dual-booted with Windows and something else and where the Windows version of the mbr is no longer present. I'd be happy to provide the documentation for the procedure to add to the install guide, if the developers are interested. As an aside, I should mention that the bsd.mp kernel hung (once) during startup with the USB floppy drive from which I booted still present. I solved the problem by unplugging the floppy drive after grub got me to the OpenBSD bootloader. This was not an issue on the i386 system, on which I use the bsd kernel. I will investigate this further and provide a bug report if I can reproduce this and it therefore seems appropriate. /Don Allen
