Freebsd, Suse Linux dual booting

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 16 September 2006 at 16:49:17 -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?

That depends on how you have laid out your Linux partition.  Given
that you have three systems on the disk, you have almost certainly put
Linux in a BIOS extended partition.  If that's the case, you can't use
the FreeBSD boot manager, because it doesn't handle extended
partitions.

> As for option 2,
> if I want to try LILO, I'll need to toss my FreeBSD boot0 menu in the trash.

You also have the option of GRUB, which is what I used in this
situation.  See http://www.lemis.com/grog/diary-apr2006.html#21 for
further details.

> 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?

Save the very first sector of the disk somewhere:

  # dd if=/dev/ad0 of=bootsector count=1

To restore it, you'll need to somehow boot, of course (I'd recommend
FreesBIE (http://www.freesbie.org/), and copy it back:

  # dd if=bootsector of=/dev/ad0 count=1

Greg
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