# Dual booting



## Learath2 (Jan 26, 2012)

Yesterday I was installing FreeBSD 9.0 before the real question I have to say that bsdinstall caused me some problems. Like I was used to old sysinstall partitioning, first create a slice then create partitions inside the slice. Anyway, I had to slice 250GB for my windows backups and the other 250 (technically 215) for freebsd FreeBSD so I used MBR and sliced twice one FAT32 one BSD then did the other slices like /usr, /var, /home, /, with a good friend's help. After all this installation and stuff it never asked me to install a boot loader. So after the restart it started windows and I changed boot order to access it but now I can only change boot order to switch between windows and FreeBSD and changing it seems to cause some problems with my motherboard like infinite boot loops. 

How can I make this work so I can have a boot loader like grub2? (even windows boot loader would be okay if that work)

And does FreeBSD have a default boot loader?


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## SirDice (Jan 26, 2012)

[thread=28436]How To: Dual Boot Windows 7 and FreeBSD[/thread]
[thread=28925]Simple dual-boot Windows and FreeBSD 9 under MBR[/thread]
[thread=28443]How to install grub2 on FreeBSD[/thread]


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## Learath2 (Jan 26, 2012)

Thanks for the reply but all those guides are the same drive 2 partitions dual boot. And the other ones I have read are one MBR one GPT can't seem to be sure what to do.


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## SirDice (Jan 26, 2012)

It doesn't matter if it's one physical disk or multiple. The principles stay the same, only the device names change.


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## archen (Jan 26, 2012)

If you've tried the above solutions and it's still not working, I'd consider giving easyBCD a try. There's a free version for private use. I have a dell machine which absolutely would not dual boot no matter what I tried. It would only boot one OS install or the other and the BSD bootloader was a no-go. My solution was to use the windows boot loader, but I couldn't get it pointed at the BSD partition right.  Easy BCD is basically a gui front end to set up the windows boot loader, and that worked for me quite well.


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## Nukama (Jan 26, 2012)

If you have already a version of Windows installed on your drive, you could try Wubi installer for Ubuntu.
This will provide you with an easy way of running Grub2 without much hassle but at the cost of used disk space (~5GB).


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## Learath2 (Feb 20, 2012)

Today, I decided to reinstall FreeBSD. *T*his time *I* went with a really fast installation *be*cause *I* knew what *I* needed to do. *W*hen the install finished *I* went back to windows, *I* added a FreeBSD entry to the list with the usage of EasyBCD, then rebooted. But now when *I* select FreeBSD it says: 


```
Initialize variable space...
Starting cmain() ... (hd2,1)

F5 Drive 1

F6 PXE
Boot: F1
```

Simply pressing enter would repeat this. F1 would repeat it. F6 would take me back to windows boot manager, and F5 will get it stuck. Changing the boot order to boot into FreeBSD wouldn't work either. *T*here is a screen with 'Loading Operating System' and it will stay there forever.

BTW: after installation in windows *I* could see two partitions. *A*fter adding the entry and trying to boot FreeBSD and trying to switch boot order, next time *I* was in windows the disk was completely empty.


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