# Installing FreeBSD paralell to Linux in a DualBoot



## atticus_sullivan (Jan 11, 2020)

Hi,
I've found no Newbie section,  but I think this fits here as well.
My aim in the End is to make a smooth transition between Linux and BSD but at the beginning I need a running system while experimenting with BSD. Therefore I want to have both systems on my laptop in a dualboot environment. To test this I've installed VirtualBox and set up a machine with LinuxMint on the one Hand and freeBSD on the other hand. Now as far as I read I've got the option to include freeBSD into the grub bootloader of LinuxMint (my preferred option) or install a new bootloader like refind.
Since I like the first option most I'd like to try getting this up and running. I know there are many similar threads but I've tried different things suggested there and none worked.

My partition layout is a disk with GPT as partition table, then a partition for LinuxMint then a partition for the BIOS (from LinuxMint) then there is the BSD-zfs partition and afterwards the BSD-boot partition

                       GPT-Partitiontable
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|  LinuxMint  |  BIOS (LinuxMint)  |  BSD-zfs  |  BSD-boot  |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------


I hope even if questions similar to this were posted already someone will help me 

Thanks in advance


----------



## stratacast1 (Jan 18, 2020)

Hi and welcome! I've never done this myself, but first off there is a bit of a direction shown on how to do this in the FreeBSD handbook. Be sure to scour the pages and do a forum search because chances are you will find how to do what you want there  There is a section on it here. There are also a few links present that you can use to guide you:









						Solved - How do I configure Grub2 to boot FreeBSD 11.1
					

I have a computer with a dual-core amd64 processor and a 500 GB hard drive which is labeled sda. Here are my partitions on the hard drive.  sda1 332.24 GB NTFS - Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit Service Pack 1 + Master Boot Record and Grub2, labeled C: sda2 9.5 GB NTFS - HP Windows Vista 32-bit...




					forums.freebsd.org
				











						Solved - Using GRUB2 to chainload GELI-encrypted root on ZFS FreeBSD 10.1-RC2
					

This post was originally titled "Using GRUB2 to chainload FreeBSD from protective MBR (PMBR)".  I have Windows 8, Arch Linux, and FreeBSD 10.0 all installed on the same disk. All my partitions are in the GPT format (not MBR). I'm able to boot into Windows and Linux, but not FreeBSD.  For...




					forums.freebsd.org


----------



## atticus_sullivan (Feb 2, 2020)

Well somehow I managed it to be able to integrate it into the grub bootloader, (kfreebsd /path/to/the/boot/loader).
(with encrypting now there is another problem, but this belongs into another thread I think)


----------

