# Dual booting with windows 7



## YoshiDan (Jan 24, 2014)

Hi, I was wondering if somebody could point me in the right direction please. I have 2 hard drives in my computer, drive 0 is dedicated to windows 7, drive 1 is dedicated to freebsd. I set up both drives with MBR because I have an older mother board without EFI. 

I've installed FreeBSD onto the second drive, 1 slice with 2 partitions - partition 0 root, partition 1 swap. After installing I rebooted into Windows and used ufs2tools to copy /boot/boot1 to c:\freebsd.pbr which I then added to the Windows boot manager. But when I reboot and select the FreeBSD option from the Windows boot menu it just displays boot error on the screen.

I figured it would work this way because in the past I've done it this way, admittedly I was dual booting on a single drive though. This is the first time I've used 2 separate drives. I'm really not sure where to go from this point onward.


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## YoshiDan (Jan 24, 2014)

Never mind. I discovered an application called EasyBCD on Windows and used that to add a FreeBSD entry to the Windows bootloader and now I'm up and running.


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## wblock@ (Jan 24, 2014)

With two drives, it's easiest to just disconnect the Windows drive temporarily (or don't, but be sure you have the right drive), then install FreeBSD to the second drive normally.

To select one on boot, use the BIOS boot menu.  EasyBCD is nice, but really only needed if a single drive is shared.

Finally, GPT should still work, there is a "protective" MBR on a GPT drive that will boot from a normal BIOS.


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## YoshiDan (Jan 24, 2014)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> With two drives, it's easiest to just disconnect the Windows drive temporarily (or don't, but be sure you have the right drive), then install FreeBSD to the second drive normally.
> 
> To select one on boot, use the BIOS boot menu.  EasyBCD is nice, but really only needed if a single drive is shared.
> 
> Finally, GPT should still work, there is a "protective" MBR on a GPT drive that will boot from a normal BIOS.



Thanks for fixing my post formatting.

My BIOS doesn't allow selecting a particular hard drive to boot from. I can change boot device order (floppy, cd, hdd etc) but I can't select HDD0, HDD1 and so on.

It's been a while since I've done this. I think last time I set up dual booting was on FreeBSD 7.x with windows XP and a lot has changed since then.


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