Is there a boot manager that can handle this?

[Alex Goncharov]

,--- I/Alex (Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:59:59 -0400) ----*
| Aren't you pointing GRUB to the same location (the third partition on
| hd0), in both entries?
,--- You/Doug (Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:04:25 -0700) ----*
| Ah, right, sorry. The bit I pasted was not the bit I actually used.

:-)

| I had changed the second one to hd0,4 in the running version but I didn't 
| back up that version of the file. I also forgot to mention that I had 
| found the ,a syntax while searching but that didn't help either.

I just (a week ago) set up a dual-bootable laptop for my daughter
(Debian 5.5 and FreeBSD 8.1), so my experience with GRUB 2 is very
fresh and very positive.  But that laptop is now 1000 miles away from
me, at the college, and I can't take a look at the grub.cfg entries, so I
am speaking from memory.

I certainly didn't use the ,a syntax -- just the plain (hd0,3).

I seem to remember though that I did use the "makeactive" in the
menu entry for FreeBSD, like in my original reply (although that was
taken from a GRUB 1 menu.lst elsewhere -- it is the "chainloader +1" that
has been always critical):

,--- I/Alex (Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:13:18 -0400) ----*
|
| title fbsd-b64 -- chainloader (hd0,2,a)
|   root (hd0,2,a)
|   makeactive
|   chainloader +1

I don't see "makeactive" in yours:

,--- You/Doug (Thu, 26 Aug 2010 17:54:01 -0700) ----*
|
| menuentry "FreeBSD 9-Current amd64" {
| set root=(hd0,3)
| chainloader +1
| }
| menuentry "FreeBSD 7-Stable i386" {
| set root=(hd0,3)
| chainloader +1
| }
|
`---------------------------------------------------*

And BTW, are you sure that you didn't forget to run update-grub2
and are looking at /boot/grub/grub.cfg, not at the /etc/grub entries?

-- Alex -- alex-goncharov at comcast.net --