Dual Boot with GRUB next to GNU/Linux "Debian"

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 29 Apr 2018 09:38:05 +0200, sj126 at uranus.uni-freiburg.de wrote:
> Just to get it unambiguous: Is the "FreeBSD pre-partition" an unallocated space
> or an empty partition, which is unmounted or ... ?

Yes, you should always leave the creation of a partition
and the initialization of file systems to the OS which
will be using them. In this case, just make sure there
is unallocated space.



> Btw, does the unallocated space physically need to be at a stretch? (How) Does
> the partition manager arrange the physical position of partitions?

Yes, a partition is always a contiguous space (here:
space not allocated yet).

Partition managers like PartEd Magic simply re-arrange
the values in the partition table. Later on, file systems
need to reflect those changes, but this can also often
be done from within PartEd Magic (check FreeBSD's "growfs").
But resizing partitions usually isn't that easy (especially
when you already have several partitions).




> As (nearly) always in the world of Free Software, I can (successfully) use
> whichever partition manager I want for this, can't I?

Yes, just make sure you have a backup. Really. A verified
backup. Just in case.

As I mentioned above, PartEd Magic is a good solution for
this task. It can be run safely from a live system CD or
DVD. I think it's also part of UBCD.



> Or is efibootmgr more
> suitable for this task?

Don't confuse the boot manager with a partition editor.
If you have UEFI working on your system, its boot manager
will do. If not, Grub can also load FreeBSD in a more
"traditional" partitioning setting - this depends on
several things, such as UEFI or BIOS, GPT or MBR, ... :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...