# Triple booting Open, Net, and Free BSDs



## sossego (Jun 22, 2010)

You will need a FreeBSD install/boot only CD, an OpenBSD install CD, and a NetBSD instal CD for this exercise.
Using sysinstall, separate your drive into three equal parts.
On the first section, use the default value of 165.
On the second section, use the value of 166.
On the third section, use the value of 169.
Set the FreeBSD partition as active and do a basic install.
Set up your root password only for now.
When prompted to remove the CD, replace it with the OpenBSD CD and reboot.
Install OpenBSD using the reserved space created for it. 
Setup root, password, user, password, ssh, and basic system.
Make the OpenBSD partition the active one.
When the # prompt comes up at the end of the install, remove the Open CD and place in the Net.
Reboot and install the NetBSD to disc.
Remove the CD and replace with the FreeBSD CD.
You can now setup the full system with the user account.
The FreeBSD bootloader will have you with:
F1- FreeBSD
F2- OpenBSD
F3- NetBSD.


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## kdemidofff (Jun 24, 2010)

btw: what about boot from fat32 device? is it hard to add to bootloader support for it?


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## sossego (Jun 24, 2010)

The setup was basically because NetBSD wouldn't recognize FreeBSD as anything but (/mnt) and that the FreeBSD partitioner wouldn't read the Open and Net BSD partition schemes set out by each.

If you're talking about booting from the FreeBSD menu, it shouldn't be difficult. You could always use grub to boot the entry if native didn't work.
If you're talking about Win32 as the native bootloader with the BSDs as entries, then I wouldn't know.
This was setup on a laptop with 11.35G of space, 256M RAM, 1.5GHz CPU. I would have added Dragonfly but, it kept complaining about ACPI.


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