Use Windows 8 boot loader?

R

rplantz

Can I dual boot Windows 8 and FreeBSD using the Windows 8 boot loader?

I currently have Windows 8 on an SSD and Ubuntu on an HDD. My BIOS is set up to use the Windows 8 boot loader on the SSD, and I used EasyBCD to tell it about Ubuntu on the other disk (the HDD).

I tried installing Debian on the HDD, and it will not work with the Windows 8 boot loader. Debian apparently insists on writing its own code into the MBR in order to boot.

I have a third disk (another HDD) and could install FreeBSD on it. If I do that, I would unplug the SSD so the FreeBSD does not trash the MBR on it. (I did that once with Debian; took me a whole day to restore Windows.)

I want to use the Windows 8 boot loader because it allows me to do troubleshooting and repair operations with my Windows. Grub will not allow that.
 
Untested, but it should work. With Windows 8, secure boot and GPT can be complications. Disconnecting the SSD is a good idea. Of course, installing VirtualBox on the Windows system and running FreeBSD inside that is easier yet.
 
wblock@ said:
Untested, but it should work. With Windows 8, secure boot and GPT can be complications. Disconnecting the SSD is a good idea. Of course, installing VirtualBox on the Windows system and running FreeBSD inside that is easier yet.
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My motherboard is a few years old so does not have UEFI. I think that makes the secure boot "feature" less of an issue.

I have installed VirtualBox under my Ubuntu. I am a newbie to VMs and would like to learn about them so have pretty much decided to install FreeBSD in that before committing to a regular disk install. Am I correct in assuming that a VM install will not muck up my MBR? Any comments about VirtualBox under Windows versus Ubuntu?

I realize that I am probably being overprotective of my MBR here, but when I messed it up with a Debian install, restoring my Win8 was very ugly.
 
The MBR can be backed up. Admittedly, that is difficult to do under Windows. Clonezilla backs up the MBR along with all the disk data.

With VMs, the virtual hard drive is usually just a file on the host's drive. The VM cannot read or write to the host hard drive directly, so it is safe.
 
With FreeBSD installed on a separate drive you could also just use the BIOS's boot menu to boot off that drive, assuming your BIOS provides such functionality (usually by pressing F11 during boot), if that works for you.

My recent experience with getting Win7/FreeBSD 9.2 dual boot off a MBR disk has teached me the hard way to be careful with tools like EasyBCD. It ended with a wiped MBR partition table on the second hdd, which EasyBCD was not even supposed to touch at all, and a couple of files like \ANG0 and \NST\AutoNeoGrub0 being written to just about any NTFS partition it could find.

Now I have a working setup to dual boot Win7 and FreeBSD using the win7 bootloader, by copying the FreeBSD partition boot sector (PBR) into a file on my win7 C: drive and creating a new boot sector loader entry using the BCDEDIT windows command line tool. Both OS are installed on the same HDD though, so your mileage may vary.
 
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