FreeBSD with Win7 and UEFI

[Warren Block]

On Sun, 28 Dec 2014, Christian Baer wrote:
>
> This is a little redundant, but I really want to make this clear...
>
> My motherboard is a Supermicro X10SAT. When the system starts, I can press 
> F12 which lets me choose the boot device (basicly like in the BIOS setup, but 
> an a temporary basis). This is a *motherboard* function, this is not a boot 
> manager from any OS. The motherboard recognises both Windows (list item: 
> "Windows boot manager") and FreeBSD (list item: "EFI OS").
>
> I have seen no other boot manager after the installation nor did I see any 
> chance to choose/configure/check one during the installation of FreeBSD. The 
> handbook in rather silent about this subject too, which is quite a surprise 
> to me. When I started out with Linux, everything was about being able to 
> coexist with Windows on a single machine. I switched to FreeBSD a little 
> later. My first FreeBSD CDs were of v3.3 (that was 1999 and I am feeling very 
> old right about now). The FreeBSD boot manager of back then wasn't as pretty 
> as the one supplied with SuSE at the time but it did the same thing.
>
> Is this an EFI thing or have the priorities shifted?

UEFI is a whole new game, utterly different from what came before.  And 
FreeBSD's UEFI support is new.  As far as I know, it has no provision 
for multibooting in UEFI.  Code to do that would be welcome, it's been 
difficult just to get the current UEFI support.

Your boot menu suggests that Windows 7 is installed for standard BIOS 
booting.  The easiest way to deal with this is to reinstall FreeBSD for 
standard BIOS booting also, with an MBR format.  Then you can install 
the boot0 multiboot program, but it really doesn't offer anything that 
the BIOS boot menu does not already have.

Please also consider running FreeBSD as a VM with one of the many 
virtualization options.  That has many advantages over multiboot setups.