Dual and Multi Booting FreeBSD, Linux, and OpenBSD
GNU GRUB Boot Loader
GNU GRUB is a powerful
open source, operating system independent, boot loader for Intel
architecture PCs. It can be compiled on, installed on, and boot
FreeBSD, Linux and OpenBSD, as well as many other operating systems.
It can boot systems from any hard disk or floppy disk in the system.
If the BIOS and operating system don't prevent it, it can boot systems
from any hard disk partition including beyond 1024 cylinders and
including any FreeBSD's disklabel partition or Linux's extended
(NOTE: If used with OpenBSD, be sure to use the OpenBSD related
commands presented below; the official GRUB documentation is almost
three years out of date as regards OpenBSD and the example commands
are not even close to what works.)
A particularly useful feature for testing dual and multi boot installs
is that it can easily be installed on a bootable floppy which can be
used to test the command syntax necessary to load each system. This
can be done without committing any changes to disk, specifically not
overwriting the hard disk's MBR. Once the necessary commands are
determined with use of the floppy, they can be saved in a
configuration file on any of the systems to be booted and the MBR
updated with a copy of GRUB that knows where to find the configuration
file and other pieces it needs.
The first sector of the first hard disk in a system has, in addition
to the partition table, executable code that is the first stage of the
boot process or the IPL (initial program load) code. The standard
code is what's created when the DOS "fdisk /mbr" command is executed.
When the BIOS settings are such that the hard disk is set to boot (or
the hard disk comes after the floppy but no floppy disk is in the
drive), the BIOS passes control to the IPL or first stage code. The
standard code loads, determines which is the active partition and
passes control to executable code in or near the first sector of the
active partition. What happens next will depend on the operating
system. With the older DOSs the actual executable core of the OS was
located at the very beginning of the disk and loaded directly from the
first stage loader. More typically a second stage boot program will
load that in turn knows where to find the kernel or core components of
the OS and then start them.
When GRUB or another boot loader is installed, the boot loader's code
will replace the standard IPL code. It has to fit into the same 512
bytes shared with the partition table. The main difference between
the boot loader and the standard IPL code is where control goes next.
In the case of GRUB, control is passed to GRUB's stage1_5 loader. When
a hard disk or floppy is installed with GRUB as a boot loader, the
appropriate stage1_5 file, which is file system specific and between 8
- 11K, is put on the first track of the disk device, starting at
sector 2. Stage1_5 is probably modified by the setup process to
include the GRUB root device that will be discussed next in the GRUB
Install section. Stage1_5 then loads stage2 from GRUB's root device.
The stage2 loader is 120K and too large to fit in the first track of a
disk. The grub.conf configuration file is also stored on the GRUB
root device. When the stage2 runs, it reads the grub.conf file and
sets up the menu with the systems defined in the grub.conf file. If
no grub.conf file can be located, the stage2 loader goes directly into
command prompt mode, which can also be accessed from the GRUB menu by
Assuming the grub.conf file has the appropriate commands to start the
installed systems, GRUB will wait for an amount of time specified in
grub.conf, start the user selected system when the user makes a
selection, or if no selection is made, start the default system when
the time to wait expires. How GRUB starts a system depends on
the system. With some systems like Linux, it directly loads the kernel
or loads a standard boot loader as it does for FreeBSD. With most
systems it chain loads the system, meaning it does what the standard
IPL loader does except that it provides other alternatives before
doing this. When the system to be booted must be chain loaded, GRUB
typically marks that system's partition active. Where the standard
loader can only work with the partition that is already set as active,
GRUB allows this to be controlled. It then passes control to a
program at a known location on the boot partition, typically at +1
sectors or the second sector. This is OS specific code that completes
the boot, in the normal manner for the selected OS.
Grub Disk Nomenclature
GRUB identifies hard disks by "hd" and floppy disks as "fd" followed by
a number starting from 0. In commands, the disk references are always
enclosed in parentheses, thus the first hard disk would be referenced
as (hd0). Disk partitions are separated from the hard disk by a comma
and identified as 0 - 3 for the primary partitions and 4 and up for
partitions inside an extended partition. FreeBSD numbers its slices
from 1 to 4, and Linux its partitions from 1 to 16, rather than
starting at 0, so you'll need to reduce a FreeBSD slice or Linux
partition number by one to get the right disk partition number. If the
partition is a BSD disklabel "subpartition" in GRUBs terminology,
these are separated by a comma and start from 'a'. Thus (hd0,2,a)
would point to FreeBSD's /dev/ad0s3a or the 'a' partition of the third
slice on the first hard disk.
GRUB uses these device specifiers for two purposes: first to identify
the location of its configuration files and then to identify the
system to be booted. The default location for GRUB's configuration
file is in /boot/grub/grub.conf on the partition defined as GRUBs root
(see below). The default configuration file can
be installed on either Linux or FreeBSD systems but a different
location is needed on OpenBSD systems because the default location
conflicts with the OpenBSD standard "/boot" file. GRUB has syntax for
specifying files by name or block lists of physical sectors where the
file resides. This is not necessary for our purposes. If you need
more information use "$info GRUB" on a system GRUB is already
installed on, such as Red Hat Linux 7.2, or see the online
When this URL was updated (Oct. 2004) the Grub discussed here has been
renamed by GNU.org to Grub Legacy, and a new product Grub 2 is under
development. There is no documentation yet for the new product.
The common home page for both products is
Booting Multiple Disks
With GRUB, you might say all you need to do is change any (hd0)
reference to (hd1) and all the commands that work on the first disk
will work on the second. This almost true. With FreeBSD and OpenBSD,
it is true as far as GRUB goes. The GRUB commands for these systems
have no other references to the hard disk being used. The commands to
start Linux however include a command line argument for the kernel
which tells the kernel the device it's booting from, naturally using
Linux's device syntax and not GRUB's. This needs to be adjusted as
well as would any other disk references for other operating systems.
This leads to another issue. When operating systems are installed
they typically contain numerous references in their system files,
pointing to the locations of various system elements. As long as
FreeBSD, Linux and OpenBSD are installed in the location that they are
being booted from there should be no significant issues (but I've only
installed one OpenBSD system on a second hard disk to test this; on a
relocated disk, each started to boot but failed during the boot
process). It's an entirely different matter to move a system
installed at one location to another. Typically you can move a disk
and mount its file systems from compatible operating systems for
reading and writing, but not booting, as all the internal references
to devices are wrong at the changed location. It may be possible to
find and adjust all such references (while booted from another system)
but it's probably quicker to install a system from scratch at a new
location than to move it.
If you intend to boot from the hard disk, then the executable copy of
GRUB still needs to be installed onto the hard disk that the BIOS will
pass control to at boot time which is nearly always whatever disk is
recognized as the first disk (or the one you currently boot from).
Another possibility is to make no changes at all to the first hard
disk, and to make a GRUB boot floppy with a menu for booting any
systems that may be installed on the second or additional hard disks.
This is more practical than it sounds. GRUB and its menu load from a
floppy much faster than FreeBSD, Linux, or OpenBSD, boot from floppy.
Eventually, the GRUB floppy should contain an entry and commands to
boot any system installed on the first hard disk. Even if you start
from a floppy, if your setup is reasonably constant, you'll want to
install it to hard disk at some point and before you do this, the
commands to boot any system on the first disk should be tested. When
you do install GRUB to the first hard disk, you can use any system to
store GRUB's files on. If you store them on the second disk and later
remove this disk, GRUB won't finish loading because it can't access
its stage2 file.
Before installing GRUB, be sure you know how to restore the first disk
to a bootable state and document this in case you ever remove the
second hard disk (or it has a hardware failure). If you made a GRUB
boot floppy that booted systems on the first disk this will still
work. You should probably restore the first system to its prior
bootable state, before removing the second disk, if that is where you
place the GRUB directory. For a single boot DOS or Windows system,
restoring a bootable state may require no more than "fdisk /mbr". For
a multi boot system, you'll probably reinstall any previous boot
loader. You could stay with GRUB, but if you were going to do this, it
would make better sense to install GRUB's stage2 and configuration
file on the first disk initially. Installing GRUB in any system except
Linux or FreeBSD, may require learning GRUB's syntax to identify
specific files or directories.
If you followed my Linux install suggestions, GRUB is loaded in the
first sector of the Linux boot partition, /dev/hda5. This insures
that Linux is bootable with a Linux boot floppy but only with a floppy
and not directly from the hard disk. If Linux is the first installed
system, then it makes sense to proceed immediately to set up Linux to
boot from the hard disk by installing GRUB into the hard disk MBR.
If Linux is installed after FreeBSD and or OpenBSD and they are
bootable, creating a GRUB boot floppy to confirm the configuration and
that all systems are bootable from GRUB, before updating the MBR seems
prudent. The only downside is that Linux will have to boot from a
floppy until GRUB is installed in the MBR.
The instructions for installing GRUB to the MBR will be provided
first. Creating and testing a floppy will be covered
Installing GRUB into the MBR is simple. Get on the system that has
GRUB installed, presumably Linux. If other systems are already
installed or you know what disk locations they will occupy (using
GRUB's notation), it's probably useful to cd to the GRUB directory,
/boot/grub, and update the configuration at the
same time you install GRUB.
As root, start the command line version of GRUB with "#grub". You'll
see a "grub>" prompt. Enter the find command looking for a key GRUB setup
file, "stage1", in the default locations.
grub> find /boot/grub/stage1
The response, (hd0,4), simply confirms what we expected. The GRUB
configuration files are located on the first Linux extended partition.
Since we installed all Linux partitions into an extended partition,
the first extended partition number (Linux's boot partition /dev/hda5)
is 4. To install GRUB we first tell it where to find its second stage
loader and configuration files. To do this the root command is used.
grub> root (hd0,4)
Then GRUB is placed in the MBR.
grub> setup (hd0)
The MBR goes with the disk not a partition so the first disk is
specified. After this, Linux should be bootable from the hard disk.
The Red Hat install creates a GRUB configuration file with the correct
commands for booting Linux. Several messages should be printed by the
setup command. The end of the next to the last should say "...
succeeded" and the last line "Done." Type "quit" to exit the GRUB
prompt. If the install succeeded, GRUB should now function as a boot
loader running from the hard disk. It will present a boot time menu
as defined in the GRUB
configuration file (located in the GRUB root
defined in the just completed hard disk install).
GRUB Boot Floppy
To make a boot floppy, the online GRUB documentation presents two
different methods, in the manual section "Creating a GRUB boot floppy",
and in the
which is the simpler method. These
instructions are slightly modified from the FAQ instructions.
Insert a new floppy or one which can be erased into the drive and
create a new file system on the floppy with "mke2fs /dev/fd0". Mount
the floppy with the new file system, "mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy". If
you've built and installed GRUB on FreeBSD or OpenBSD, modify these OS
commands appropriately. Create a new /boot/grub directory on the
floppy and copy the files stage1, stage2, and menu.lst from /boot/grub
to /mnt/floppy/boot/grub. If you want the boot floppy to go directly
into the system boot selection menu, then also copy grub.conf By
pressing 'c' in the selection menu you drop to the GRUB command
prompt. As you may not remember the commands to load a specific
system this may be convenient since it does not hinder access to the
GRUB command prompt. Unmount the floppy but leave it in the drive.
Then run GRUB interactively and use the following commands
grub> root (fd0)
grub> setup (fd0)
These commands correspond directly with those used to set up the hard
disk MBR. First the root command tells GRUB that its files are on the
floppy (in the default location), then setup installs the boot
programs to the floppy. Assuming setup ended with "...
succeeded\nDone." you should now be able to boot from this floppy. If
you included grub.conf, a menu of the systems listed for booting in
grub.conf should be displayed. If so, you can get to the command
prompt by pressing 'c'. If there is no grub.conf, then GRUB will go
directly to the command prompt. In this case, you'll need to know the
exact filenames and locations of the two Linux boot files to boot
Linux. You can test booting FreeBSD and OpenBSD with the simpler
command lines for those systems if they are installed.
When you've installed Linux with GRUB and know where you plan to
install any other systems, you may want to setup grub.conf once, for
all the systems that will be booted via GRUB. The worst that can
happen is that you'll get a command wrong and the system won't boot.
This is where the floppy will come in handy. You can boot using it and
try the menu. If one or more selections don't work, go into command
mode, and try the same commands. If you can't remember the commands,
GRUB includes a "cat" command. "grub> cat /boot/grub/grub.conf" will
display the configuration file from the floppy; long files will scroll
off the screen. You can observe GRUB's error messages and experiment
until you get valid commands; for any other systems including other
Linux variants you may have to do some research on the system's boot
process. When you successfully boot from the floppy, you'll know what
corrections need to be made to the grub.conf file. If you type "help"
in GRUB, you'll see two full columns of available commands. Obviously
many of GRUB's many features are not being covered here, only the
essential mechanics to boot FreeBSD, Linux, and OpenBSD with it.
Below is a grub.conf file, less the leading comments, to boot a disk
with one OpenBSD, two FreeBSD and one Linux system.
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.7-10)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda5
title OpenBSD 3.0
title FreeBSD 4.4 #1
title FreeBSD 4.4 #2
The bulk of the file are the four sections that start with the word
"title". Everything on the same line following "title" is simple text
that will be displayed in GRUB's boot menu to identify the system to
be booted. The following lines, until the next title lines are the
commands necessary to load the system. The order the title sections
appear is the order the prompts appear on the menu.
Before the system specific commands are general configuration
commands. The "default" command tells GRUB which system to highlight
and boot if a user doesn't make a manual selection. The numbers,
starting with 0, refer to each "title" section. With this
configuration file, to make OpenBSD the default in this grub.conf
file, change the 0 to 1. You could move another title section first,
to display it first and make it the default, leaving default=0.
You can also have GRUB save the last loaded system as the default for
the next boot. Change the "default=0" line to "default=saved" and add
the "savedefault" command (no arguments) as the last command in each
title section. When you switch to the savedefault mode, the first
title section will be the default on the first boot. GRUB saves the
current selection just before initiating the boot sequence. By using
the savedefault command in two or more title sections and leaving it
out of one or more title sections you could create a menu that would
allow the default to switch between some systems but never be set for
The timeout is how many seconds GRUB waits before loading the default
system. If any keys are pressed in this time, GRUB will wait until
an explicit selection is made.
The commented splashimage line would normally cause the Red Hat boot
page graphic to be displayed. The file specification syntax is simply
the absolute path the to the file, starting from the root and with the
path following the root without any intervening spaces. The image
does not need to come from GRUB's root location. I don't object to
the Red Hat splash screen but that when you expect to use the command
mode, the commands are much harder to read against the Red Hat graphic
than the default text display, which is light gray letters on a black
For the system specific commands, when they are entered interactively
at a GRUB prompt, they must be followed by a separate explicit "boot"
command to start the system just specified. When they are entered
into a grub.conf file the boot is implicit. As soon as the explicit
commands are executed, boot is executed. Don't forget to type boot in
interactive mode or Grub will sit idle until you do something.
GRUB and Linux
title Red Hat Linux (2.4.7-10)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.7-10 ro root=/dev/hda5
# The following works to boot Red Hat 7.1 installed on
title Red Hat Linux 7.1
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.2-2 ro root=/dev/hda7
The Red Hat 7.2 Linux commands are exactly as they have been set up by
the Red Hat install. Since they work, I've seen no reason to look for
alternatives. Regardless of how you set up Red Hat 7.2 Linux, the
installed GRUB commands should be correct.
If you are using a distirbution other than Red Hat Linux, you may need
to adjust the root to reflect the actual Linux boot partition. You'll
also need to adjust the exact filename of the kernel and its location.
As for the rest, including the initrd (ram disk loader), you'll need to
read the GRUB and possibly some distribution specific documentation to
make any necessary adjustments. Since the initrd line is not
necessary for Red Hat 7.1, it may not be necessary for other Linux
The one Red Hat 7.1 install I did, overwrote GRUB in the MBR with
LILO, and GRUB had to be restored as described
elsewhere in this section.
GRUB and FreeBSD
title FreeBSD 4.4 #1
title FreeBSD 4.4 #2
GRUB's FreeBSD loading commands are simple and have little variation.
All that will change will be the root location which can be any disk
in the system and any slice from 0 - 3. The disklabel subpartition
letter will also vary for advanced FreeBSD installs, that include
multiple bootable systems in a single slice. The second command is
supposed to be the same for all recent versions of FreeBSD. In the
examples above, which came from the first quad boot system I created,
the Linux extended partition was in the second partition and the two
FreeBSD partitions came last so the 2 and 3 partition indicators were
correct for this system.
GRUB and OpenBSD
title OpenBSD 3.0
OpenBSD was installed into to the first disk, partition 0, so the root
is what's expected. The GRUB documentation describes OpenBSD as one
of the officially supported systems and says the boot commands are
identical to those provided for NetBSD. This is simply wrong or more
accurately badly out of date. Apparently this was true up through
OpenBSD 2.5; at least that's what's indicated in the GRUB e-mail list
archives. The NetBSD commands did not work for me and I tried many
variations. GRUB archive searches provided the answers. As OpenBSD
diverged from NetBSD, they apparently changed something important in
the boot process in 2.6. There were messages from 2.7 and 2.9 users
giving exactly the same errors I was seeing in 3.0. Commands that
boot OpenBSD were provided in the answers.
GRUB aspires to be a universal boot loader. As such it provides the
first two stages of the boot process then directly loads the kernel or
other OS specific boot files. A number of systems use boot approaches
that are not compatible. To deal with these systems, GRUB also
functions as a simple boot manager and not a full loader. To boot
these systems GRUB marks their partition as active and passes control
to the normal OS specific, boot loader comparable to GRUB's stage1_5
loader. This is called chain loading. The GRUB developers clearly
believe this is an inferior method. Exactly the same sequence of
commands and syntax as are used for OpenBSD, should work for Windows
systems and OS/2; all that should change is the root location.
From a user perspective, the only difference is the completely
different command syntax. Because chain loading is being used with
OpenBSD, only the hard disk and primary partition are provided, and
not the disklabel subpartition that would be expected of a BSD
system. Depending on disk size, the primary partition is likely
to be 0 or 1, but on smaller disks that don't go much beyond 1024
cylinders, may be anything from 0 to 3. The other two commands
should be identical for all OpenBSD systems from at least 2.7 and
Two or more OpenBSD systems can be installed and booted from a single
hard disk with GRUB's assistance. Grub.conf is updated to contain two
(or more) parttype commands as shown below. The first two lines in
each title section, switch the slice types so neither OpenBSD system
ever sees the other; they are necessary. If two a6 slices exist, only
the first will ever boot regardless of the following GRUB commands. At
boot time, the user sees two prompts, and booting two copies of
OpenBSD becomes just a matter of the using the right GRUB commands.
With GRUB, it's no more difficult than booting any other two systems.
title OpenBSD 3.0 One
parttype (hd0,1) 0xa8
parttype (hd0,0) 0xa6
title OpenBSD 3.0 Two
parttype (hd0,0) 0xa8
parttype (hd0,1) 0xa6
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