WinBSD - Encrypted Dualboot - GELI - Need assistance

[quakerdoomer]

Merry Christmas. Merry Pagan Holidays. Merry whatever wish to be marry about. Happy Holidays!!

I installed Windows10 on a laptop - allocated 97 GB to C:
I'll enable BitLocker later.

Now I have around 140 GB of free space remaining. With limited amount of RAM, I intend to skip ZFS this time and resort to UFS(2).
Would appreciate your help to get FreeBSD onto the free space with GELI

The automated FDE via the setup is only available for the entire disk, not for remaining amount of free space.
So here we are:

Trying to get Windows and FreeBSD 15 Dual boot - with GELI encryption:
Partition table as of now:

ada0 GPT
ada0p1 100 M type efi
ada0p1 16 M type ms-reserved
ada0p3 97 G type ms-basic-data
ada0p4 663M ms-recovery

I have created
ada0p5 type freebsd-ufs 136 GB
and
ada0p6 type freebsd-swap 4 GB
ada0p7 type freebsd-ufs 438 MB #Do I need this for /boot ?

I have done a geli init on ada0p5 and it attaches and detaches successfully.

How do I now proceed. I take I will need to manually decompress some base and other tgz files.
What then, where does /boot go?

LLMs are useless. They say "now proceed with your FreeBSD installation" . Please guide if possible.
Help appreciated. Thank you kind person

 

[Alain De Vos]

The first question is not will you use encryption or not.
The first question is which boot loader will you use ?
And how will you on boot switch between Windows & FreeBSD ?
Many, many possible setups are possible , so LLM cannot answer nor I.

As far as i know grub is unare of encryption.
Maybe by booting pressing key you can choose.
There are also specific Windows bootloader applications.
If they find the freebsd boot partition it will work.
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Fyi,


In the traditional FreeBSD BIOS/MBR boot sequence,
boot0 and boot1 represent the first two stages of the bootstrap process.


boot0 (Stage 0: The Boot Manager)

• Location: Resides in the Master Boot Record (MBR), the very first 512-byte sector of the hard drive.
• Function: It is a minimal boot manager. Its primary task is to scan the partition table and let the user select which "slice" (partition) to boot from.
• Interaction: If installed, it displays a simple menu (e.g., F1 Win, F2 FreeBSD).
• Size: Restricted to roughly 446 bytes of code because it must share the 512-byte MBR sector with the drive's partition table.
• Configuration: Managed using the boot0cfg(8) utility.

boot1 (Stage 1: The Partition Boot Sector)

• Location: Resides in the first sector of the FreeBSD slice (partition) chosen by boot0.
• Function: It is the first stage of FreeBSD-specific code. Because it is also limited to 512 bytes, it lacks a filesystem driver. Its sole purpose is to locate and load the more complex boot2 from the next few sectors of the disk.
• Interaction: Entirely automated; users typically do not see or interact with it.
• Relationship to boot2: On disk, boot1 and boot2 are often stored as a single concatenated file called /boot/boot, which the FreeBSD installer writes to the beginning of the FreeBSD slice.

Summary of the Sequence

1. BIOS loads boot0 (Stage 0) from the MBR.
2. boot0 allows the user to select a slice and then loads boot1 (Stage 1) from the first sector of that slice.
3. boot1 loads boot2 (Stage 2), which has enough intelligence to find and execute the final loader (Stage 3) from the actual filesystem.

Note: For modern systems using UEFI instead of BIOS, this legacy MBR-based system is replaced by boot1.efi and the loader.efi binary located on an EFI System Partition (ESP).