Correct placement of partitions for a dual-boot setup.

Micrified

Micrified

Context

I'm dual booting. I've got both operating systems installed on separate NVMe drives. The layout is as follows:

Code: 
root@system:~ # gpart show nda0 nda1
=>
34         1953521664 nda0 GPT           (932G)
34         2014            - free -      (1.0M)
2048       204800        1 efi           (100M)
206848     32768         2 ms-reserved   (16M)
239616     1952238221    3 ms-basic-data (932G)
1952477837 1395            - free -      (986K)
1952479232 1042432       4 ms-recovery   (509M)
1953521664 3471            - free -      (1.7M)
=>
40         488397088 nda1 GPT            (233G)
40         1024         1 freebsd-boot   (512K)
1064       984            - free -       (492K)
2048       4194304      2 freebsd-swap   (2.0G)
4196352    484200448    3 freebsd-zfs    (231G)
488396800  328            - free -       (164K)

Problem

In my infinite wisdom, both drives have individual GPT partitions. I wanted to be able to dual-boot the disks, but I've realised that neither system's boot-loader will be able to detect the other's partition, because they reside on different disks entirely.

Question

What's the best solution to my problem? My goal is to have FreeBSD as the "main" boot loader, with an option to boot to my second OS (Window). Do I have a correct understanding of my quandary with the boot loader? Should I repartition the larger disk, install the smaller OS on it (FreeBSD), and then use the second disk as storage?

Thank's in advanced for any input :)
 
With operating systems residing on separate disks, dual booting is easy, you can use the UEFI boot selector: just press F9 at boot (or whatever key depending on your machine) and select the disk to boot from. No need to mess with bootloaders.
 
I can inform what I do and works very fine. I make room on my first disk (ID:0) for a small void-linux partition.
Then I'll boot legacy & use the linux grub bootloader to boot ANY OS, eg. freebsdbootloader-on-ufs which i use to boot freebsd-on-zfs , Linux , Windows , etc ...
 
bsduck

Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately, my BIOS does not seem to have a key for selecting the disk to boot from. Rather, I need to navigate through a few BIOS menus to reach it every time. I'll probably have to try something else if I want a more automated experience.
 
Micrified said:
bsduck

Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately, my BIOS does not seem to have a key for selecting the disk to boot from. Rather, I need to navigate through a few BIOS menus to reach it every time. I'll probably have to try something else if I want a more automated experience.
Click to expand...
Same for me. It takes the Master-Boot-Record of the "first" disk as recognized by the bios.
But as i installed linux grub it refers to the grub conf which allows me to boot "everywhere".
 
Alain De Vos said:
I can inform what I do and works very fine. I make room on my first disk (ID:0) for a small void-linux partition.
Then I'll boot legacy & use the linux grub bootloader to boot ANY OS, eg. freebsdbootloader-on-ufs which i use to boot freebsd-on-zfs , Linux , Windows , etc ...
Click to expand...
Do you think I could simply do this on FreeBSD without creating another partition and installing something like void linux? For example:

1. Obtain and build the GRUB2 source on FreeBSD
2. Mount the /efi partition of my Windows10 disk somewhere in FreeBSD
2. Run the install command
Code: 
 grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/path/to/mounted/efi --bootloader-id=GRUB
?
 
My experience is that FreeBSD is fit to boot freebsd.
For multi-booting other operating systems you might need linux-grub or an alternative is a Windows boot loader like easybsd.
neosmart.net

EasyBCD

EasyBCD is a software utility for Windows that lets you control and configure the BCD/BOOTMGR bootloader for Windows 7, Windows 10, and Windows 11 for dual-boots.
neosmart.net neosmart.net
But that last one might be more difficult to configure.
 
You could just copy /boot/loader.efi to that existing efi partition. But I'm not sure if loader(8) will be able to find the freebsd-zfs partition on the other disk. It searches the disk it started from (nda0 in this case). Never tried to boot it from a different disk.

My current set up is dual booting with EFI and rEFInd but both FreeBSD and Windows 10 are on the same disk.
 
bsduck SirDice

Really appreciate the input. I think I'll try copying
Code: 
boot/loader.efi
to the
Code: 
efi
partition on my larger disk as SirDice mentioned. Then see if it gets picked up there. I'll update here as soon as I do :)
 
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