UEFI multibooting: FreeBSD and DragonFly BSD

spacelander · 08-19-2016, 04:33 AM

I'm exploring other BSD besides FreeBSD, and as I don't own enough machines, I multiboot. I installed DragonFly alongside FreeBSD in UEFI mode, and as their loaders are based on each other, the DragonFly loader always booted FreeBSD (there is no way of choosing which partition to boot from, and the boot loader always choose the first it could read).
Now I installed rEFInd and downloaded the UFS1 drivers from http://efi.akeo.ie/ so that rEFInd could load the second stage boot loader (loader.efi) directly from the DragonFly UFS partition. However, it stops after this screen, the cooling fans go up, and nothing happens: http://imgur.com/a/SYCBt

Ztcoracat · 08-20-2016, 04:59 PM

Hi:

I'm not running BSD so I won't be much help there.
However; I did find documentation about BSD and installing another boot manager that should help you.

Quote:

If you have installed multiple operating systems on your disks then you can install a different boot manager, one that can display a list of different operating systems, and allows you to choose the one to boot from. Two of these are discussed in the next subsection.

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/handbook/Booting/

Instructions for the LILO bootloader are further down the page.

You can also install the Grub bootloader-

-::-How to install grub2 on FreeBSD-::-
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/28443/

Hope that helps.

Ztcoracat · 08-20-2016, 05:03 PM

Extra links-

http://geodsoft.com/howto/dualboot/grub.htm
http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...rub2-boot-menu

spacelander · 08-22-2016, 09:02 AM

Thanks, but all those links are for MBR booting not UEFI booting. I already figured out how to do both, what I can't figure out is why the boot process stops midway.

Ztcoracat · 08-23-2016, 12:22 AM

Did you recently do a kernel upgrade and than it stopped booting midway?

Was there a time when it didn't stop midway?

Maybe change bootloaders?

cynwulf · 08-23-2016, 06:43 AM

I know zero about UEFI, but it sounds to me like you're configuring boot0 with the boot manager "menu". If your machine boots to a list with F1, F2, etc to select the OS, then that's the case.

Just don't do that and it should work.

Ztcoracat · 08-23-2016, 04:03 PM

I think you may have borked your bootloader.

Try booting to a Live CD (Knoppix would be a good choice) and have a look at the boot loader config file. Reinstall the bootloader if that's possible w/o performing a fresh install.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

cynwulf · 08-24-2016, 08:49 AM

Ztcoracat, you can't really rescue any kind of *BSD system using Linux livecds.

spacelander, you probably need to restore the bootcode. Reading the manual is inevitable. How it's done depends on whether it's an mbr or gpt disk, etc.

spacelander · 08-25-2016, 07:09 AM

There is no such thing as boot0 for UEFI, that's MBR only. There is only boot1.efi and loader.efi. I didn't upgrade anything, I just installed the OS on a separate partition, and didn't even edit the loader.conf configuration file, as could't boot. I tried though to mount the DF partition on freebsd and change some things in loader.conf, but it didn't do anything.

Ztcoracat · 08-25-2016, 02:42 PM

It sounds like the bootloader is broken.
If your os is still hanging/stopping midway I think it's safe to say the boot mgr is borked <or> misconfigured.

Since your os is still hanging at boot time..........
Doing a fresh install may be the only thing to fix your issue.

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/ha.../Installation/

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/12793/