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  • Question before Installing BSD for First Time

    From Rockinghorse Winner@21:1/5 to All on Thu Dec 7 03:42:50 2023
    Hi, I really want to try BSD out. My only computer is a generic laptop with
    3 linux distros installed and using grub as boot manager. I have a lot of
    free space on the drive (~500 GB). I would like to:

    1. Create a partition for BSD
    2. Install BSD into this partition, but not let BSD install any boot manager
    or otherwise mess with the hdd.
    3. Let grub-mkconfig detect the BSD kernel, and boot from the menu.
    4. Alternatively boot from the grub cli.

    My questions are these:

    1. Should I use a particular partition type when creating the partition with
    parted or fdisk? What guide shows exactly how to do this?
    2. Does the BSD install script allow you to install BSD into a paricular
    partition? Is there a good guide to this?
    3. Is grub able to detect the BSD system and add it to the menu? What are
    the grub cli commands to boot BSD from the grub cli?

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  • From Winston@21:1/5 to All on Thu Dec 7 06:13:26 2023
    Most of your questions I can't answer, but as to partition types...

    ISTM that a non-ZFS root partition would be the easiest way to start.

    A ZFS root partition (type freebsd-zfs) needs a boot loader capable of
    reading ZFS partitions (e.g., gptzfsboot, included with FreeBSD), but installing that may impact booting your other O/Ses.

    You'd still be able to create other ZFS partitions or datasets once
    FreeBSD is running, if you wish.
    -WBE

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  • From Vlad Markov@21:1/5 to Winston on Thu Dec 7 11:41:54 2023
    On Thu, 07 Dec 2023 06:13:26 -0500
    Winston <[email protected]d> wrote:

    Most of your questions I can't answer, but as to partition types...

    ISTM that a non-ZFS root partition would be the easiest way to start.

    A ZFS root partition (type freebsd-zfs) needs a boot loader capable of reading ZFS partitions (e.g., gptzfsboot, included with FreeBSD), but installing that may impact booting your other O/Ses.

    You'd still be able to create other ZFS partitions or datasets once
    FreeBSD is running, if you wish.
    -WBE


    Look here:
    https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/bsdinstall/

    The FreeBSD maintainers believe in documentation, I think your answers are all there.

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  • From Rockinghorse Winner@21:1/5 to Vlad Markov on Fri Dec 8 00:08:13 2023
    On 2023-12-07, Vlad Markov <[email protected]> wrote:
    On Thu, 07 Dec 2023 06:13:26 -0500
    Winston <[email protected]d> wrote:

    Most of your questions I can't answer, but as to partition types...

    ISTM that a non-ZFS root partition would be the easiest way to start.

    A ZFS root partition (type freebsd-zfs) needs a boot loader capable of
    reading ZFS partitions (e.g., gptzfsboot, included with FreeBSD), but
    installing that may impact booting your other O/Ses.

    You'd still be able to create other ZFS partitions or datasets once
    FreeBSD is running, if you wish.
    -WBE


    Look here:
    https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/bsdinstall/

    The FreeBSD maintainers believe in documentation, I think your answers are all there.

    I'll give it a shot. I've looked around and not seen what I'm after, but
    will check out that link.

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