# Boot problems



## balanga (Mar 3, 2018)

I have a multiboot disk on which I have installed a number of bootable partitions, as wells numerous bootable ISOs on one partition. It took a long time to get configured and worked great up to a point. I had to install sysutils/grub2-efi to make it boot on all my laptops, some of which don't support long mode. It boots up OK on those. The ones that do support long mode, which I think are all uefi machines have a problem in that they are unable to boot into FreeBSD. When I select FreeBSD from the grub menu, I get a flashing cursor and the system hangs. I do not have this problem if I select a Linux system to boot. 

This particular disk was able to boot all OSes on all systems at one point. The problem seems to have started when I installed Debian on another disk whilst both disks were attached, so I can only assume that Debian somehow 'touched' the EFI partition on my mutiboot disk. Is it possible that changes to the EFI partition could have made FreeBSD unbootable?


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## ralphbsz (Mar 3, 2018)

I would think that if Grub comes up at all, the EFI partition must be OK.  Maybe Debian damaged the FreeBSD root or boot partition?  Did you have correct partition types set for them?

My suggestion: Get FreeBSD on a USB stick as a recovery system, boot from that, and use that as a debugging tool to examine what it thinks is on your multiboot disk.

By the way, if you are in the US: Costco has Seagate external USB disks for sale right now, for $60 or $70 each.  They are decent quality disks, in a very convenient little package, and at a good price.  Both my son and me ended up buying one independently.  It might be a better solution for you to have several small/cheap disks, than one big one with a complex multiboot setup.


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## chrbr (Mar 3, 2018)

balanga said:


> The problem seems to have started when I installed Debian on another disk whilst both disks were attached, so I can only assume that Debian somehow 'touched' the EFI partition on my mutiboot disk.


Is it possible that grub of the Debian system has been installed, too? If I remember correctly it has been some how default in the past. If yes, then the grub things installed be FreeBSD is overwritten by the grub things installed by Debian.
This is just an idea. Grub is its own kind of a monster ...


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## balanga (Mar 3, 2018)

ralphbsz said:


> I would think that if Grub comes up at all, the EFI partition must be OK.  Maybe Debian damaged the FreeBSD root or boot partition?  Did you have correct partition types set for them?
> 
> My suggestion: Get FreeBSD on a USB stick as a recovery system, boot from that, and use that as a debugging tool to examine what it thinks is on your multiboot disk.



I have various ways of accessing the disk.... ThinkPad Ultra bays are excellent, but I can also boot via USB or PXE to access the disk without booting from it.

So access is not an issue, it's a matter of sorting out what is causing the problem

I can also boot from the disk itself on a ThinkPad T60  and then boot from a FreeBSD 11.1 i386 partition. 



> By the way, if you are in the US: Costco has Seagate external USB disks for sale right now, for $60 or $70 each.  They are decent quality disks, in a very convenient little package, and at a good price.  Both my son and me ended up buying one independently.  It might be a better solution for you to have several small/cheap disks, than one big one with a complex multiboot setup.



I just bought a 1TB drive today and an enclosure . I'm in the UK.

I do have numerous disks. They can be picked up quite cheaply from car boot sales when someone's Windows computer fails to boot


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## balanga (Mar 3, 2018)

chrbr said:


> Is it possible that grub of the Debian system has been installed, too? If I remember correctly it has been some how default in the past. If yes, then the grub things installed be FreeBSD is overwritten by the grub things installed by Debian.
> This is just an idea. Grub is its own kind of a monster ...



This is what I suspect....

Maybe I should dd(1) the start of the disk and see if there is a Debian signature somewhere...


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