Last month’s column introduced the powerful Grand Unified Boot Loader (GRUB), a utility that enables you to boot one of many operating systems when you start your computer. That column looked at basic GRUB configuration, including setting up GRUB on a floppy disk to boot Linux.
Last month’s column introduced the powerful Grand Unified Boot Loader (GRUB), a utility that enables you to boot one of many operating systems when you start your computer. That column looked at basic GRUB configuration, including setting up GRUB on a floppy disk to boot Linux.
This month’s column goes further, with a look at using GRUB to boot FreeBSD, DOS, and Windows. It also includes information on hiding and unhiding partitions, changing the apparent order of your physical disks, and installing GRUB on your hard disk as a permanent boot loader.
Booting FreeBSD
FreeBSD boots much like Linux: the boot loader must load the kernel into memory, and the kernel takes it from there. However, FreeBSD presents its own unique challenges, and comes with its own boot loader. If your system multi-boots to FreeBSD, you should first understand some additional points about GRUB’s partition-naming system.
Typically, FreeBSD takes over a primary partition (what FreeBSD calls a slice) and breaks it into subpartitions (what FreeBSD calls a partition). This scheme is very similar to the logical partitions that can reside within an extended partition in the standard x86 partitioning scheme. GRUB numbers regular x86 logical partitions starting at 4, but what about FreeBSD’s partitions? To avoid confusion, GRUB gives them letters, starting with a. These letters correspond to the final character of a FreeBSD device filename for the partition.
For instance, (hd1,a) refers to the first partition in whatever slice holds the…
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