Setting up triple boot (w/ Win7, Xubuntu 12, and FreeBSD 9)

C

CuddlyKittens11

Hey there.

In a few days my new laptop is going to be coming in and I'd like to set up three operating systems. It's already comes with Windows 7 on it, and I'm going to slap Xubuntu 12.04 on there as my work OS, but I'd like to add FreeBSD 9 as my "play around," OS.

As far as I know, there are probably two partitions when it comes in; Windows 7 and recover. I'm not sure which order I should install Xubuntu and FreeBSD in, or which boot manager I should use (GRUB)?

I've only installed FreeBSD in virtual machines or systems where I could use the entire disk. And in the past I screwed up my computer's partitions horribly.

I already searched this sub-forum to find any answers and I didn't find them too helpful or that easy to understand. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Step 1: back up the new system, all of it, before doing anything, even before allowing Windows to boot for the first time. Clonezilla is good for this.

Before continuing, realize that just installing alternate operating systems as virtual machines is often more convenient (can run more than one at once) and safer for experimentation.

Then resize partitions and install the other operating systems. The FreeBSD boot manager, boot0cfg(8), can do multibooting if that system uses MBR partitioning (likely). If you want the fancier grub setup, search here, there are loads of threads like this one: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=23572.
 
Since you already have windows 7 and you're going to keep it you could use EasyBCD to create a nice boot menu using windows' own bcd boot loader. It should be able to boot both Linux and FreeBSD as long as the disk is MBR partitioned. The upside of using it is that the MBR remains unchanged unlike with boot0cfg or GRUB. The downside is that you have to do all the configuration from windows.

http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/
 
Okay, thank you two. I'll probably play around with it some more in a virtual machine, then do a native install of FreeBSD after I've played around with it some more.

I'm just still a little confused on how I should setup my partions; regarding things like swap space and other stuff.
 
(Sorry for the double post.)

Okay, my new laptop came in, and I've got an update on my status:

I've got Windows and Linux installed with those two operating systems correctly partitioned (hopefully), with some free space set aside for the FreeBSD installtion. This is how my partitions look right now:

Code: 
  Partition  | File-Sys | Mnt Pnt | Label |     Size    | Flags
---------------------------------------------------------------
/dev/sda1            NTFS     SYSTEM_DRV         1.46 GiB  boot
/dev/sda2            NTFS     Windows7_OS      300.62 GiB
/dev/sda4        extended  /                   150.00 GiB
    /dev/sda5        ext4                      100.00 GiB
    /dev/sda6  linux-swap                        4.00 GiB
    /dev/sda7     unknown                       46.00 GiB
/dev/sda3            NTFS     Lenovo_Recovery   13.57 GiB

/dev/sda5 is where I put my linux distrobution, and if I could, I'd like to put FreeBSD on /dev/sda7. I find it a bit weird though that I set it to be free space, but gparted recognizes it as 'unkown' where as EasyBCD and fdisk see it as 'linux'.

Right now GRUB 1.99 loads up, then lets me select the OS. If I can, I'd like to get EasyBCD to do that.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
 
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