Greetings,

I have 2 physical disks. The first is a 320GB with win7. The second is a 1TB drive with Ubuntu 10.10 and FreeBSD. The 1TB is split evenly between the 2 OS's.

Ubuntu is on the first half, BSD on the second. Did complete install of both. Only the 1TB drive is installed at this time. I was planning on using LILO from linux to boot both win7 and FreeBSD. However the default Unbuntu install doesn't use lilo. I haven't pursued it yet beyond seeing the liloconf complains about the cylinders on the big drive, etc. Darn!

I realized that I could use bcedit for win7 as a boot manager, (lazy me). It has entries for linux and FreeBSD. It boots linux great, doesn't want to do anything with BSD.

I've tried to 'boot /dev/ad4s3 and /dev/ad8, anything I can read from the bootup msg screen, etc. No luck. The only way I can get to BSD is to boot the CD and go in to reinstall and only then can I see the BSD slice present on the drive.

If anyone has any helpful thoughts I would appreciate it. (RTFM, it's a win7 questions, did you check the how-to's are not helpful thoughts, yes I have). :-)

Thanks,

Photon

LILO is pretty old ... I guess you need to read up on grub.
The *cough* lazy solution is to install Windows first, then Ubuntu which will pick up your Windows install and add it to the boot menu.
Finally install FreeBSD and take a close look at how grub handled Windows and Ubuntu. When installing FreeBSD you probably don't want it to mess around with the boot sequence but add its boot partition to grub.conf manually from Ubuntu once the install is done.

It should be possible to fix your current install by booting from CD but that is pretty complex in my experience.

Do you have any idea how long I've been ignoring GRUB? :-) Thanks for the suggestion, I'll give GRUB a shot. If I can reinstall FreeBSD and get Linux to boot BSD I should be good to go. Again using the lazy method to boot Linux.

install windows then ubuntu w/ GRUB then freebsd, then you can go into /boot manually and add the freebsd drive as a boot option. There are some straightforward tutorials on how to do this around so a simple google search should suffice. btw i didnt even realize you COULD install LILO with the new ubuntus, Grub is definitely the way to go.

Alternately: this way may be even easier- download and install the super grub 2 disk onto a cd and boot into it...from there you should be able to install grub 2 and configure it how you like

I attempted something similar trying to dual boot XP and Ubuntu on a two drive laptop. I found out that bootloaders, at least in my experience, expect to boot from the first drive they find. You said only your 2nd drive is installed at this time. It's possible you thought, as I did, that each OS could have its own boot on its own drive, but that is not valid.

What I learned is tht you have to have EVERY disk permanently attached if you have an OS on it that you expect to load. That's also why loading your Micro$loth OS first and letting GRUB overwrite and add Windoze to its boot set is such a good idea.

YMMV

Try this one mate:
http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2011/02/28...and-windows-7/