# General instruction for installing FreeBSD and not breaking existing gpt UEFI partitions; want to boot FreeBSD with grub



## ahev (Mar 21, 2020)

I am trying to install FreeBSD to the same HDD to which my Linux and Windows are installed; so it may be called triple-boot. I am using EFI-compatible firmware and a version of grub that on startup offers me to load one of the 2 systems that I have installed; now I want to install FreeBSD as the third system and I have a veeery big doubt that it will give me an opportunity to preserve what is written to my first HDD sectors and let the existing grub detect FreeBSD as the third system and boot its 2-stage loader.

But first of all, as I am going to try to install FreeBSD, I need free space and a partition (or maybe a couple of them) to be allocated, right? So the first question:

1) Do I need multiple partitions? (root, swap, /, for example) or can I use single root with swap as a file (this is actually the layout I am using now with Ubuntu, for reference see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Partitioning#Single_root_partition)

2) Even if I can do with one partition, how do I choose the appropriate file system for it? Currently I have 300 GB of free storage not allocated for anything on my drive, as far as I know (I may be mistaken), in order to create a partition, one needs to specify the file system. So how do I specify the file system in parted, for example? I am trying to prepare the partition(-s) before plugging in the usb stick and booting from it to run FreeBSD installation process.

This is only my first question here, as I am so sure that there are going to be a lot more as I make progress with the installation.

Side note: please do not make references to the handbook. If I am here, that means it did not help me.

Side note 2: I have found this discussion that seems to be very related I am trying to install FreeBSD to the same HDD to which my Linux and Windows are installed; so it may be called triple-boot. I am using EFI-compatible firmware and a version of grub that on startup offers me to load one of the 2 systems that I have installed; now I want to install FreeBSD as the third system and I have a veeery big doubt that it will give me an opportunity to preserve what is written to my first HDD sectors and let the existing grub detect FreeBSD as the third system and boot its 2-stage loaders.

But first of all, as I am going to try to install FreeBSD, I need free space and a partition (or maybe a couple of them) to be allocated, right? So the first question:

1) Do I need multiple partitions? (root, swap, /, for example) or can I use single root with swap as a file (this is actually the layout I am using now with Ubuntu, for reference see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Partitioning#Single_root_partition)

2) Even if I can do with one partition, how do I choose the appropriate file system for it? Currently I have 300 GB of free storage not allocated for anything on my drive, as far as I know (I may be mistaken), in order to create a partition, one needs to specify the file system. So how do I specify the file system in parted, for example? I am trying to prepare the partition(-s) before plugging in the usb stick and boot from it to run FreeBSD installation process.

This is only my first question here, as I am so sure that there are going to be a lot more as I make progress with the installation.

Side note: please do not make references to the handbook. If I am here, that means it did not help me. I have found this discussiong that seems to be related https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/installing-freebsd-without-overwriting-the-mbr.74498/
but it is not clear how to install base.txz and kernel.txz to the UFS filesystem? I mean - first, how to create a UFS partition with parted, second - how to install these tars to the new partition, it is not clear to me, please explain.


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## ahev (Mar 22, 2020)

Okay, this discussion helped me a lot in understanding the process https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/installing-freebsd-without-overwriting-the-mbr.74498/#post-456340


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## ahev (Mar 23, 2020)

The question is still open, but I asked it in this thread https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/bootloading-in-case-of-uefi.74619/


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