# FreeBSD Boot Loader Location



## Harley51 (Oct 11, 2009)

I'm going to load FreeBSD to a primary partition on the second drive and I want the boot loader on that partition. During install I have three choices. Boot Mgr = Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager. Standard = Install A Standard MBR (No-boot Manager). None = Leave the Master Boot Record Untouched. I'm not sure which one will install it to the root partition.


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## Beastie (Oct 11, 2009)

"None" will do nothing. The other two will install a small program on the MBR (the first block/sector on the boot disk). The "Standard MBR" will allow you to boot FreeBSD only. The "FreeBSD Boot Manager" will allow you to boot FreeBSD along with up to 3 other operating systems installed on the 3 other primary partitions.


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## Harley51 (Oct 11, 2009)

So you can't put the FreeBSD Boot loader on the root partition that it's installed on. Here's what I have now First drive is Windows XP. Second drive first partition is PC-BSD, second partition is Mandriva, third partition is Fedora, forth partition is LinuxMint, fifth partition is Ubuntu, sixth partition is PCLinuxOC. I use windows Boot manager to jump to the boot loaders on the second drive. Each distro boot loader is install on the root partition of each distro. That what I would like to accomplish here with FreeBSD 7.2.


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## aragon (Oct 11, 2009)

The "standard" MBR is not only capable of booting FreeBSD.  It is a generic chain loader that attempts to chain load the active partition.  An active partition could be a bootable Windows partition too.

Harley, you'll need to experiment, but I would install the standard MBR just in case.  A FreeBSD partition does have a boot loader at the beginning too - all bsd labels do.  If the windows boot manager can chain load directly to a partition, it should work fine, other wise chain load to the drive and the MBR on that drive will hopefully chain load to your active FreeBSD partition in turn.


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