Bug 210571

Summary:	10.3 installer does not offer multi-boot option
Product:	Base System	Reporter:	MMacD <scratch65535>
Component:	misc	Assignee:	freebsd-sysinstall (Nobody) <sysinstall>
Status:	New ---
Severity:	Affects Many People	CC:	junchoon, nwhitehorn
Priority:	---
Version:	10.3-STABLE
Hardware:	amd64
OS:	Any

Description MMacD 2016-06-25 14:15:29 UTC

Installing 10.3 to a second MBR partition with Win7 already installed, I realised after the install finished that it had not offered the multi-o/s boot utility as it should have.

Comment 1 Nathan Whitehorn freebsd_committer

2016-06-27 01:13:10 UTC

This is not part of the default installer sequence because (a) the default partition type is GPT, for which FreeBSD has no boot manager, and (b) usually people seem to want a more featureful boot manager than boot0, or have one already, in the dual-boot case.

We could offer an option to run boot0cfg in the final menu, or a suggestion that that be done from the offered shell. Would that be a reasonable solution?

Comment 2 MMacD 2016-06-27 20:02:11 UTC

Sure, that'd be fine.  On some level it's trivial, I suppose, but I can never remember how to do it by hand so when I upped to 10.3 the other day it felt as though I had to really fossick around awhile to rediscover the syntax.

As far as GPT being the default, isn't that bit premature?  I'm thinking of the fact that W7 and even XP still had millions of seats as of March--between them about 4X more than W10:

>Windows XP was still running on 10.9% of all desktops as of March 2016, according to stats compiled by Net Applications.  To put that in perspective, according to Net Applications’ figures, Windows XP is still the third-most popular desktop OS, trailing only Windows 7 (51.9%) and Windows 10 (14.2%).
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/04/11/millions-of-people-are-still-running-windows-xp/

Comment 3 Nathan Whitehorn freebsd_committer

2016-06-28 04:26:52 UTC

(In reply to MMacD from comment #2)

GPT has been the default in FreeBSD for almost 5 years at this point, with relatively few problems, except when installing onto a system with an existing operating system, in which case the existing partitioning, whatever it is, will be retained. I'll try to add a menu item at the end of the installer.

Comment 4 Tomoaki AOKI 2016-07-03 08:54:46 UTC

FreeBSD boot manager (boot0ext, aka 1024-bytes boot code) isn't built by default on 10.x.
I'm not sure if it works fine for recent large drives.

For UEFI, you can find one (supports upto 35 partitions throughout all drives connected) at PR 207940 by Naomichi Nonaka.

 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=207940

For some UEFI motherboards, possibly onboard UEFI boot manager would work.
(Should be UEFI boot only.)