Booting 2nd(!) FreeBSD installation sitting on same disk

[Mehmet Erol Sanliturk]

On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Andre Albsmeier <Andre.Albsmeier at siemens.com
> wrote:

> For various reasons I have to use this disk layout:
>
> One harddisk with MBR and 3 slices on a i386 box:
>
> Slice 1: Windows XP :-(
> Slice 2: FreeBSD 7.4-STABLE V1
> Slice 3: FreeBSD 7.4-STABLE V2
>
> The MBR is configured as:
>
> options=packet,noupdate,nosetdrv
> default_selection=F2 (Slice 2)
>
> When booting, I can choose between:
>
> F1 Win
> F2 FreeBSD
> F3 FreeBSD
>
> However, when pressing F3, the system of slice 2(!) is
> loaded. This is due to the fact that boot1 always loads
> the first active FreeBSD slice ;-(.
>
> I have two possibilities to actually boot slice 3:
>
> 1. Playing with currdev when loader(8) is loaded (or
>    using loader.conf of slice 2).
>
> 2. Using boot0cfg to allow updating the MBR.
>
> 1. is not really fexible and 2. means that the system
> remembers which slice was booted last (something I do
> not want).
>
> Is there no chance to actually honour the fact that F3 was
> pressed and boot from slice 3 without updating the MBR before?
>
> Thanks,
>
>         -Andre
>
>
There is the following port for managing boot selections :

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/amd64/packages-9.0-release/Latest/grub2.tbz

http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/grub2/


I do NOT know whether it may be useful for you or not .


Thank you very much .

Mehmet Erol Sanliturk