Freebsd, Suse Linux dual booting

[Jerry McAllister]

On Sat, Sep 16, 2006 at 04:49:17PM -0700, Dan Bikle wrote:

> FreeBSD and Linux people,
> 
> I have a PC which I want to boot as windows, FreeBSD, and Suse 10.1 Linux.
> 
> Currently, FreeBSD boot0 menu shows both Windows and FreeBSD as boot-able.
> 
> The FreeBSD boot0 menu does not show the Linux OS (which I just installed).
> 
> So, I did some reading of the FreeBSD handbook:
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/boot-blocks.html
> 
> It suggests that I have 2 ways to solve this problem:
> 
> 1. Configure the FreeBSD boot0 menu so that it can boot
> Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux
> 
> Or,
> 
> 2. Replace The FreeBSD boot0 menu with  LILO Boot Manager
> 
> I like option 1.
> 
> Q1: How do I add Suse 10.1 Linux to the FreeBSD boot0 menu?
> 
> As for option 2,
> if I want to try LILO, I'll need to toss my FreeBSD boot0 menu in the trash.
> 
> Q2: If I cannot get LILO to boot FreeBSD, how do I boot get
> FreeBSD to boot and then how do I restore my old FreeBSD boot0 menu?

Well, LILO should be able to do it.
But it should work anyway with the FreeBSD MBR.
Did you install FreeBSD last?
Did you tell it to put in the FreeBSD MBR?  You must have if it 
sees Win and FreeBSD.
Did you install Susie in a primary partition (slice) and not some
logical partition within a slice?
Did you define the Susie slice as bootable?   It must have a
boot sector on it too.   The boot manager just checks all the primary
slices to see if they have boot sectors and then puts them in a menu
for booting.   If it recognizes it as a bootable sector, but does not
find any identifying information, it puts it in the menu but with ??? as
the system identifyer.  

Since the FreeBSD boot manager (MBR) follows the official standard and
uses only one sector, it doesn't have a lot of room to store tables
of different systems and recognition information.   So, it is pretty 
much FreeBSD, MS-Dos except NTFS and generic Linux as far as I can see.
The rest are identified as ???, but they will boot just fine, because
all the MBR has to do is load the boot sector and hand off control.

The two advantages of Grub or some other third party MBR is that they
cheat and generally use a whole track instead of only one sector because
most systems don't do anything with the rest of the track anyway.
That gives them more room for nice looking menus and other things
and to muck with logical partitions or whatever.   This works fine
for most cases, but could cause problems if some system tries to
also assume the rest of the track will not be used and tries to do
something with it.   Some "instant" recovery systems do that.  Then
those more fancy MBRs will not work or the other system will not work
and you will need something that follows the official rules like the
FreeBSD MBR.   - I have used the FreeBSD MBR to rescue systems that
had one of those instant recovery utilities trashed itself, even though
that was on XP.   So, I think it is good to keep the FreeBSD MBR handy.

////jerry

> 
> Thanks,
> -Dan
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