# Triple boot - Windows XP, Windows 7 and FreeBSD 8.1 with GRUB2.



## cucu007 (Feb 15, 2011)

Dear Daemons,

I am to the point of pulling the little hair I have left. I install XP, 7, and FreeBSD with the FreeBSD bootmgr. Now my goal is to replace the bootmgr of FreeBSD with grub2 and load all the entires with grub-mkconf, some some reason grub-mkconfig appears broken in some sort of way so I try tweaking around with /usr/local/etc/grub.d/40_custom and /boot/grub/grub.cfg. When I rebooted the system I still see that the FreeBSD boot loader is still king, does that mean I need to do some work in my MBR. I wish there were some clear intructions on how to get this thing working. Thank you for any help.:e

PS. I am sure a lot of people are looking for an answer to this.


----------



## cucu007 (Feb 17, 2011)

help anyone...


----------



## francis (Feb 17, 2011)

Hi, when the FreeBSD became my system of choice, I stopped to boot more than one system.
Frankly, I not remember how to do this in right way. But, I will try to help You.

On the network is really plenty of "HowTo's" which describe dual booting problem using GRUB. Not only boot problems between *BSD and Windows (but also between Linux/Windows and *BSD!). And I think that adding third system, will be not a big problem (or it should not be). 

*o* Boot FreeBSD using GRUB. It is only an example, how config file could look like.
*o* Setup and use GNU/Grub bootloader. Read it very carefully.
*o* Dual Booting Windows XP and FreeBSD with GRUB (2004).

*o* DualBoot It will help You to understand some issues, e.g. partitions names, stands for sectors on the slices and so on (source: Vivek Varghese Cherian's Personal Home Page).

Much easier way?: EasyBCD 
I hope you manage to achieve your goal!


----------



## rambetter (Feb 18, 2011)

If you insist on using Grub, and if the FreeBSD boot manager is still loading (it's the program that let's you hit e.g. F1 or F2 for different partitions), then you most likely did not run grub-install.  grub-install will write the first stages of grub into a specified location, and you want that location to be the MBR of your drive.

However, I would question using Grub.  I really like the way the FreeBSD boot manager works.  The only think you have to be aware of with the FreeBSD boot manager is that it "delegates" full execution to whichever partition you choose.  So all you have to do is make sure that the boot sectors on your partitions have code to boot the operating systems in those partitions.  Usuaully it's a harmless extra step to configure this, but I have not tried this with Windows.


----------



## synonymous (Feb 19, 2011)

Hi,

I definitely am not a guru, but I went through the pain just recently (albeit the pain ended 12 hours ago). I have Windows XP Pro, FreeNAS (based on nanobsd), and Xubuntu. Needless to say, I created 4 partitions - one each for Grub, WinXP, FreeNAS, and Xubuntu.

I had a similar issue with replacing the Xubuntu, and FreeBSD bootlader. After following this article http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub.html, I was able to get it right.

Just curious - did you write the Grub stage 1 to the first sector of your hard disk? Again, I opted for Grub, not Grub-2.

-SR


----------



## cucu007 (Feb 23, 2011)

francis said:
			
		

> Hi, when the FreeBSD became my system of choice, I stopped to boot more than one system.
> Frankly, I not remember how to do this in right way. But, I will try to help You.
> 
> On the network is really plenty of "HowTo's" which describe dual booting problem using GRUB. Not only boot problems between *BSD and Windows (but also between Linux/Windows and *BSD!). And I think that adding third system, will be not a big problem (or it should not be).
> ...




Francis,

Thank you for the tip. EasyBCD did it for me, now I have FreeBSD, CentOS 5.5, Windows Xp, and Windows 7 in a single drive. It took a bit of reading but that's part of the journey of being a FreeBSD user. Grub is broken I think, that's why I was having such a difficult time. EasyBCD is awesome for this type of things. Thank you again Francis.


----------



## cucu007 (Feb 23, 2011)

rambetter said:
			
		

> If you insist on using Grub, and if the FreeBSD boot manager is still loading (it's the program that let's you hit e.g. F1 or F2 for different partitions), then you most likely did not run grub-install.  grub-install will write the first stages of grub into a specified location, and you want that location to be the MBR of your drive.
> 
> However, I would question using Grub.  I really like the way the FreeBSD boot manager works.  The only think you have to be aware of with the FreeBSD boot manager is that it "delegates" full execution to whichever partition you choose.  So all you have to do is make sure that the boot sectors on your partitions have code to boot the operating systems in those partitions.  Usuaully it's a harmless extra step to configure this, but I have not tried this with Windows.



Thank you rambetter, I am sticking with EasyBCD and the windows boot loader. I got my Quad boot working perfect in my laptop and in my job machine.


----------



## cucu007 (Feb 23, 2011)

synonymous said:
			
		

> Hi,
> 
> I definitely am not a guru, but I went through the pain just recently (albeit the pain ended 12 hours ago). I have Windows XP Pro, FreeNAS (based on nanobsd), and Xubuntu. Needless to say, I created 4 partitions - one each for Grub, WinXP, FreeNAS, and Xubuntu.
> 
> ...




synonymous, GRUB appears to be dead. EasyBCD is way better and I got quad boot working. Move on from GRUB>


----------

