Dual-Booting FreeBSD with Linux

**chopin1810** · 10-09-2005

I know people have asked this numerous times before, but I can't find the posts, even with the search page. It never works for me. Oh well. Lock this then.
Anyway. I need to know how to make GRUB see FreeBSD 4.11 and boot to it so I can have the option to boot to either Linux, FreeBSD, or Windows. I've tried this before but it never works: either the entry doesn't show up at all or the entry shows up but I get a funky error from BSD. I'm sure somebody out there has gotten this to work. Explain as much as possible as I'm kinda clumsy when editing read-only configuration files. I've looked at the GRUB documentation but can't quite figure it out.

**jaboua** · 10-09-2005

Tip: google "grub freebsd"

this is the first hit:
http://geodsoft.com/howto/dualboot/grub.htm#freebsd

So you change the "hdx,x" part to suit your freebsd partition in grub language. The "a" is used to indicate the root partition in the freebsd "slice". Simply add this to your existing menu.lst, which I assume allready has a windows and linux entry.

**anomie** · 10-09-2005

I also run FreeBSD 4.11, but it's on a different box than my SuSE box.

What grub entries have you tried for FreeBSD so far? The grub manual says:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...e/FreeBSD.html

... we'd recommend loading the very flexible loader /boot/loader instead. See this example:

grub> root (hd0,a)
grub> kernel /boot/loader
grub> boot

I am presuming that hd0,a refers to first physical drive, first partition. So which disk/partition is your FreeBSD / filesystem on? And did you create a separate partition for /boot?

**jaboua** · 10-09-2005

I think it is like (hdX,Y,a) where the the X indicates which drive, Y indicates which "slice"/PC-partition and "a" indicates the root BSD-partition (a is always root, b is always swap, c is the whole drive, d,e,f... are the other partitions you sat up during install)

**anomie** · 10-09-2005

That makes sense. The grub docs may be out of date.

And you're right, "slice" is the correct term in BSD world.

**chopin1810** · 10-11-2005

Originally Posted by anomie

I also run FreeBSD 4.11, but it's on a different box than my SuSE box.

What grub entries have you tried for FreeBSD so far? The grub manual says:

http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...e/FreeBSD.html

... we'd recommend loading the very flexible loader /boot/loader instead. See this example:

grub> root (hd0,a)
grub> kernel /boot/loader
grub> boot

I am presuming that hd0,a refers to first physical drive, first partition. So which disk/partition is your FreeBSD / filesystem on? And did you create a separate partition for /boot?

There's only one BSD partition on my machine. It's hda2 (second partition, windows is the first.)

**the0r3tic** · 10-13-2005

Just use the same code you use to dual-boot Windows and Linux. Simple as that.

Your partition would be:

Code:

&#40;hd0,1&#41;

Because in UNIX, 0 = 1 in alot of things. So hd(0,0) would be equal to /dev/hda1

So the code would be something like this:

Code:

rootnoverify &#40;hd0,1&#41;
chainloader +1
boot

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