From owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Sep 12 16:50:49 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 15DD21065694 for ; Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:50:49 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from mitchell@wyatt672earp.force9.co.uk) Received: from relay.pcl-ipout02.plus.net (relay.pcl-ipout02.plus.net [212.159.7.100]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AC9D28FC16 for ; Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:50:48 +0000 (UTC) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: ApoEAMNnq0rUnw6T/2dsb2JhbADaEIQYBYFW Received: from ptb-relay03.plus.net ([212.159.14.147]) by relay.pcl-ipout02.plus.net with ESMTP; 12 Sep 2009 17:21:34 +0100 Received: from [81.174.208.21] (helo=81-174-208-21.pth-as1.dial.plus.net) by ptb-relay03.plus.net with esmtp (Exim) id 1MmVLx-0007ys-JN; Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:21:34 +0100 From: Frank Mitchell To: ukfreebsd@uk.freebsd.org, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:26:14 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.10 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200909121626.14819.mitchell@wyatt672earp.force9.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Plusnet-Relay: e19e8e4490e3e4c2eba7bc786ba01b5f Cc: Subject: Ordeal By OtherBSD X-BeenThere: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Non technical items related to the community List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:50:49 -0000 Hi again: I experimented with Multi Booting various BSD flavours. Looks like I spoke too soon about NetBSD. I tried installing the latest NetBSD Release and it seemed there was no way to stop it affecting the FreeBSD Slice, which then appeared to have been wiped clean. So it looks inadvisable to install NetBSD unless you plan to reinstall FreeBSD completely afterwards. I tried OpenBSD to see if that fared any better. OpenBSD tries to mount other Slices too, warning that all data will be deleted. I managed to avoid this and kept my FreeBSD alive, but I was lucky. If you don't have experience with OpenBSD's unfriendly Fdisk and Disklabel Editor, you risk losing your entire Hard Disk configuration. And you need to ensure you keep your FreeBSD Boot Selector, because OpenBSD doesn't provide one. Then I tried a DragonFly install, which was buggy but harmless. However, while the DragonFly Boot Selector can start FreeBSD, it emerges that the FreeBSD Boot Selector won't necessarily start DragonFly. Note that all these OtherBSDs still allowed me to multiboot Linux Distros in the DOS Extended Partition. This was possible because OpenSuse lets you put GRUB in a Custom Boot Partition, which in my case is the Ext2 Slice reserved for Data. Yours truly: Frank Mitchell