Multi BSD boot loader

[Andrey Shuvikov]

On 9/18/07, Joshua Isom <jrisom at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've brought back to life a P3 I got at a school auction years back to
> use for testing software under various operating systems(presently all
> bsd) on i386.  My main "server" is FreeBSD/amd64.  The P3 has a 10 gig
> hard drive I'm not intending to upgrade(unless I buy an sata hard drive
> and find that the bootloader works for atapi sata hard drives in 7.0).
> I've currently partitioned it into four partitions, with FreeBSD,
> OpenBSD, and DragonFlyBSD.  The fourth is unused at the moment, and I
> left it open for a fourth system to test on, but I partitioned it as
> "FreeBSD".  Here comes the problem.  The boot menu currently looks like
> this.
>
> F1: FreeBSD
> F2: BSD
> F3: FreeBSD
> F4: FreeBSD
>

Based on my experience FreeBSD loader (slice boot-sector) tries to
load the system from the first FreeBSD (A5) slice it can find. So even
is you press F3 you will load FreeBSD rather than DragonFlyBSD. I
resolved this issue by installing GRUB and temporarily changing the
slice type of the slices I didn't want to boot from. In addition you
can edit menu.lst before rebooting to specify which entry should be
booted next.