Solved [SOLVED] FreeBSD 10.0 install w/Win-7, handbook issue

dcbdbis

dcbdbis

Good afternoon all,

In doing several installations of FreeBSD 10 to testbed machines. I find that the handbook's installation walkthrough compared to what is actually displayed on the screen installing FreeBSD 10 is different. Example: There is no option to install a bootmanager on a system with Win-7 when installing FreeBSD 10.0. By default, the FreeBSD 10.0 installer just installs itself to the MBR and then user intervention is required to recover Win-7. Yet on the installation section of the handbook, it talks about a bootmanager option, that I don't see when doing a FreeBSD 10.0 installation.

Also, the FreeBSD 10.0 partition editor (slices) automatically assumes GPT and will wipe out Windows 7 as a result. Win-7 still uses MBR. There is no "auto-mbr" option during the installation of FreeBSD. I have done the manual partitioning sucessfully under MBR, but when I do, I am not given a choice of a bootloader or a bootmanager during the installation, and then Windows becomes inaccessible when the MBR is automatically overwritten by the FreeBSD boot loader.

Forgive me for swearing, but Windows 7 is where I play games, and where my CAD software lives. Windows lives in my system for those purposes alone. Skyrim, Machinarium, X-Plane, CAD.

As I am selecting the default options from the installer, I am asking:
What do I need to do differently at install time to tell FreeBSD 10.0 to use MBR and a bootmanager to sucessfully install alongside Windows 7?

And, I have a request:
May I request that the FreeBSD handbook installation section be updated to reflect the new installer that comes with FreeBSD 10?


I have read on the wiki.Freebsd site about a couple of procedures, that aren't consistent, with posts by others stating that the procedure broke their Win installations...Then in the forums, I also see a couple of posts that involve differening procedures that are overly complicated. Post responders have replied that they have had mixed results. I can't seem to find consensus on how to install FreeBSD w/Win-7 without a lot of high-risk hoop-jumping. And even at that...mixed results. I am in a production environment. It would be disasterous for me to install FreeBSD over my linux install, and at the same time kill Win-7 leaving me dead in the water. I do have emergency VPN connections to my clients in my Win-7 install. Yes I have everything backed up...But a full system recovery would take a lot of time and labor that I really want to avoid.

I am looking for an official document, an official how-to, an official FAQ, on how to install FreeBSD 10 alongside Win-7 in a dual-boot configuration. I haven't found one yet. If such a document exists that is known to work, and recognized by the FreeBSD dev's as "orthodox".....Please accept my apologies for not finding it myself ( I have been looking).....and I would sure appreciate a pointer to it so I can read it, and follow it.

Please forgive the engineer in me...I am looking for a procedure to follow that is known to work reliably.



Thank you for your assistance,


Sincerely and respectfully,

Dave

PS: If installing FreeBSD alongside Win-7 cannot be done in safety, I have purchased a new HDD for FreeBSD. I'll simply install FreeBSD to this new drive if I have no other choice.....and then chainload FreeBSD from my existing Syslinux boot manager.

Edit: Numerous edits to fix grammer I thought I had fixed in preview mode. No content changed.
 
Re: FreeBSD 10.0 install w/Win-7, handbook issue

You are looking at the wrong chapter of the Handbook. There is a separate chapter for bsdinstall(8), the installer used in FreeBSD 9 and later. Here is the newer chapter: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall.html.

The installer has changed a bit. As far as I know, there is no way to install a multi-boot loader with it. There is no official procedure for dual-booting.
Here is the procedure I use:

Back up your Windows disk. Seriously.

Shrink the Windows 7 partition. This is difficult, terrible, and prone to failure. About half the time, Windows has decided to locate unmovable files right in the middle of unused space. I have found no good, reliable way to do it. Thanks, Microsoft!

Once space has been made for the FreeBSD install, create a new partition and install FreeBSD to it. Do not choose "Entire Disk", just a partition.

Reboot into Windows, install EasyBCD, and use it to add the FreeBSD installation to the boot menu. Reboot again, and FreeBSD will be available from the menu.

You can use FreeBSD's boot0 boot loader, but people complain about missing features, and Windows will overwrite it if you use one of their "fix" commands.
 
Re: FreeBSD 10.0 install w/Win-7, handbook issue

Thank you for the pointer. I was indeed reading the wrong article regarding the installation. The article you provided to me is exactly what I do see when I install FreeBSD 10.0.

On installing to a second partition....I have read that the procedure you mentioned may allow FreeBSD to overwrite the Win-7 bootmanager, or in my case, the Syslinux boot manager. I guess this can be fixed by unclicking at the partition editor section the "Install Boot......."

I already have Win-7 and Linux cohabiting the same hdd in peace. Win has 275Gb of it, and Linux has the balance of this 1TB SSD. I think I will leave it alone....and just install FreeBSD to my new additional HDD so it can have to whole disk to itself. Then I'll chainload it through Syslinux's boot manager. This is a multi-boot scenario...but one I could defend as "orthodox" without risking anything to either of the OS's.

I was just hoping to install FreeBSD to my SSD for the obvious reason of speed.


Thank you for the reply!


Sincerely and respectfully,


Dave

Edit: I will post back here if I was successful or not. If successful, I will post the procedure I used to do it. I am sure that there are others who are in similar circumstances as I am as a professional consultant in the process of porting to FreeBSD. But where our business circumstances prevents us from just overwritng Linux and being done with it, and where dumping Win-7 is not a feasible option at this point.
 
If FreeBSD has a whole disk to itself, the BIOS boot menu can be used without any changes to the drives.
 
I just finished the installation and it went very smoothly.

To explain to others just reading this thread:

I am a consultant who has his clients on Linux, soon to be FreeBSD. And a new client to me, a small city in Colorado is about to go FreeBSD. Because I have two clients on Windows 7, several clients on CentOS, I was not able to just wipe the primary drive and start over with FreeBSD.

I had a testbed laptop which I installed FreeBSD on, and cut my initial FreeBSD "teeth", including doing several sucessful kernel builds. I am no FreeBSD expert...but the transition from Linux with the help of the forums has been nice, easy, without any nasty surprises. I did my homework first.

FreeBSD 10.0 and Win-7 on the same HDD comes with a certain amount of risk if you are just moving over. I am sure an experienced FreeBSD person would have dived right in and had no issues. I chose not to "dive" in out of fear and FreeBSD inexperience. There are some wiki's, and on these forums that speak to dual-booting for those less fearful than I...I also read mixed results by some....Likely not following the posted procedure to the letter. For those that have mission critical data on drives that just can't be risked.....here is how I did it in a safe manner.

I want to repeat: for those who are replacing their OS with FreeBSD outright, none of the below applies... Just let the FreeBSD installer do it's thing.

a) Spend the ~$90 bucks for a new HDD if you are not converting in one go. Or if you have a spare...then "reallocate" it for FreeBSD.

b) I stuck with the MBR partitioning shceme, which means I had to manually partition my FreeBSD slices. Not a big deal. I stuck with MBR because there are mixed posts on the Syslinux site about it working properly with GPT. If you are keeping GRUB, GRUB supports GPT so you should not have a problem...Just do your required reading in advance of install like I did and you'll avoid unleasant surprises.

c) Install FreeBSD to the new or reallocated HDD. The installer is quite verbose and easy enough to tell which drive you are installing to.

d) Modify you boot loader in linux to chainload FreeBSD 10.0. I don't use grub, I use Syslinux. If you use Grub, there are plenty of howto's on this site that have a procedure for it.

Take a look at the "Windows" section of this code, and the "FreeBSD" section. Except for the labels and the HDD#, they are identical. I chainload FreeBSD just like I chainload Windows. Use the Grub documentation if you are using Grub for the specifics about configuring Grub to chainload from a GPT scheme.

Here is the relavent section of my "syslinux.cfg"

Code: 
LABEL freebsd
	MENU LABEL FreeBSD 10.0
        COM32 chain.c32
        APPEND hd4 1

LABEL arch
        MENU LABEL Arch Linux x86_64
        LINUX ../vmlinuz-linux
        APPEND root=/dev/sda6 rw vga=0x318 elevator=deadline
        INITRD ../initramfs-linux.img

LABEL windows
        MENU LABEL Windows 7 x64
        COM32 chain.c32
        APPEND hd0 1

I simply copied and pasted the code from the Windows entry, changed the relavent data, then pointed the "APPEND" line to my new HDD...

Bingo!!!

Simple, Easy, and I risked nothing in this method. FreeBSD installed without a hitch...and I could boot into it as soon as I added the entry for my boot manager. For me, it was a no-fuss, no-fear install.

I hope this helps others....It's not the only way....I just want to make clear that it is a way that I thought through, so as not to jeopardize hosing the other OS's making it impossible for me to work until I had recovered the system.

I feared not for FreeBSD's behavior....I feared myself fat-fingering something.....


Sincerely and respectfully,


Dave


PS: A BIG thanks to "wblock" who has answered a lot of my posts in other areas, helping me engineer my own install and initial config of FreeBSD on my desktop.....I am sincerely appreciative...
 
That is a lot of work to use sysinstall(8). The new installer will let you create additional MBR slices and FreeBSD partitions in them. After that, it's just a matter of picking a boot loader.
 
I just may be going down that road fairly soon wblock.

Moving 5 tb of data through NFS mounts is painfully, painfully, painfully slow......But so far....I'm really liking the logical organization and consistency of FreeBSD... I've created a linux VirtualBox VM on my FreebSD install to support my linux clients....So I may be putting FreeBSD on the 1TB SSD primary drive than originally planned.

I never knew that FreeBSD was this good. HonestlyI didn't. I would have moved over when NVIdia released the video drivers for FreeBSD if I had known then, what I know (and am) learning now...

My VM screams! I mean it's fast beyond my comprehension. Not on my best, custom, esoteric linux kernels compiled with the appropriate flags set to build specifically for my AMD Piledriver....Have I ever seen such performance! FreeBSD is outperforming anything else that has been on my hardware in a clear, hands-down manner....

I just wish moving data between the two OS's wasn't so damned slow....... It took me 3.75 hours yesterday through an NFS mount to another machine I setup just for this purpose to move 138Gb of data.....And I need to move 5 TB!


Other than that...So far I really like what I see..

And today I did a "sudo pkg upgrade"....and it didn't break anything!


Best Regards,


Dave
 
aeyeaws said:
If I have to use disklabel and all that crap 10 should be released as / /var /tmp /usr dump files.
Click to expand...

Fortunately, it is not necessary to use the legacy tools. gpart(8) can created MBR slice/format partitioning, or the bsdinstall(8) partition editor can be used. I wrote a forum post on this, but our (adjective deleted) new forum software broke the link. The old link is http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?p=149210&postcount=13.

Found and recreated here: https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=45072.
 
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