If the bootloader doesn't work this time I'll go insane

[George Harrison]

Hello, I am currently running Xandros and it's so easy to use I think I am going to replace Windows with it. With Win gone I will have a huge drive to work with and then I'll still have my old Linux slave drive to do expiriments on. I'll take everything off and start clean, but first I am curious to see what FreeBSD will do with a clean slate. I've tried installing it five separate times but failed when nothing would boot. For this expiriment should I use 5.3 or 4.11? (Just downloaded 4.11). I will be very angered if FreeBSD doesn't load with a clean slate of nothingness on my computer. No previous bootloaders, no OS's - nothing will be on my computer. Thanks for the advice.

[sether]

It's extremely easy to dual boot Linux and Free/Open/NetBSD using LILO. I've never tried it with GRUB, but that should work too. Just Google around and you should find something. Don't use the *BSD bootloader to boot Linux though cause it probably won't work.

For example, this would be the LILO entry (/etc/lilo.conf) if you had FreeBSD installed on your first hard drive, 3rd partition:

 other=/dev/hda3
 	table=/dev/hda
 	label=FreeBSD

Then run lilo