Re: Possible to boot NetBSD with GRUB?

[Thierry Laronde]

On Wed, May 15, 2002 at 12:05:55AM -0400, address@hidden wrote:
> Without going into too many of the technical details, is it currently 
> possible to get NetBSD or OpenBSD booted using GRUB?  Or do these OS's only 
> work with their own bootmanagers?  

There have been some patches some time ago for FreeBSD (IIRC), but
consider that at the moment the *BSD are not _natively_ supported. This
means that you can not have GRUB booting _directly_ the kernel. But GRUB
can chainload the bootloaders of the *BSD.

The distinction here is that, for example, OpenBSD bootloader can not
give you a choice to boot something else than its own stuff. You need
another bootloader to have the choice --- say GRUB. So when you install
a *BSD _don't install the bootloader on the mbr_: the installation will
install a sector at the beginning of the 'a' slice of the portion of a
disk devoted to *BSD. Once this is done, you can tell GRUB to chainload
this sector. If the a slice is on the 4th primary partition of the first
disk, the two lines:

root (hd0,3,a)
chainloader +1

will give control to the BSD bootloader.

For general infos, make a search on Google or others for multiboot. I'm
sure there are howtos even if I have no URL at hand.

Cheers,
-- 
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <address@hidden>
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C