# Installing Other OS With FreeBSD



## poorandunlucky (Feb 7, 2018)

Hey,

say...  I have another hard drive in this machine that's just a secondary ZFS cache while I figure out what to do with it right now...  I was thinking of adding it to my current pool, or making it my home folder's dataset or something like that, but it just occurred to me just now that, meanwhile, I could install other OSes on it...  Well, probably...

I don't know how to do that, though...

How would I install another OS on the other drive?  Well, how would I boot into that other operating system once it's installed?  More importantly, how do I make sure it doesn't touch my primary boot device, and how do I safeguard it overwriting something important?

My primary boot device that has FreeBSD on it has three partitions, and FreeBSD is in a ZFS pool on a GELI device attached to one of those...

Should I bother backuping my gpart and geli metadata?

Would any operating system change anything beyond the space with the bootloader?

I'm just scared that I install something on the secondary IDE and it decides it's the only thing that should exist on my computer, and wipes just enough that my primary drive becomes lost...

I'm planning on trying out PC-BSD, a few flavors of Linux, and maybe try to install Windows 10 or 7 (for better hardware support) (this was a Windows 7 machine)...


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## SirDice (Feb 7, 2018)

poorandunlucky said:


> More importantly, how do I make sure it doesn't touch my primary boot device, and how do I safeguard it overwriting something important?


The simplest solution is to just disconnect the drive temporarily. That way you can _never_ overwrite anything important.


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## poorandunlucky (Feb 7, 2018)

SirDice said:


> The simplest solution is to just disconnect the drive temporarily. That way you can _never_ overwrite anything important.



I would if I didn't need to switch the drives around...  I have to unscrew the base, and unscrew the supports for both drives, and switch them...  My BIOS (Dell) won't allow me to boot from the secondary channel...  Or rather, it won't POST without a drive in the primary channel...  : \


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## Handsome Jack (Feb 7, 2018)

Just for the info, Can you  bring up boot menu by interrupting computer startup with one of keys usually in range F1 - F12 ?


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## SirDice (Feb 7, 2018)

poorandunlucky said:


> Or rather, it won't POST without a drive in the primary channel...


That's annoying. As you also mentioned IDE, how old is this machine?


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## tingo (Feb 8, 2018)

Some machines has a boot menu built into their firmware (often F12 or F8) if this works to boot different drives / partitions you don't need anything else. For machines with modern (read: UEFI) firmware, I prefer to use rEFInd, it has to be installed manually, but then it detects all operating systems installed and just works.


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