Installing FreeBSD’s boot manager on a dual boot system

The FreeBSD boot manager is quite good, for me it’s worked in all my setups except for a Vista setup I once had but quickly got rid of (for obvious reasons). I’m pretty sure GRUB will work with Vista however.

Sometimes in a dual-boot environment you have to reinstall one of the Operating Systems. Usually it will be Windows as it is usually the case in my setup. When Windows is reinstalled, I will lose the FreeBSD boot manager and only be able to boot into Windows. To get the FreeBSD boot manager back, just put the FreeBSD boot-only disc (it’s only about 30MB) in the drive, boot into it, then follow these instructions:

1. In the menu, go to Partitions
2. Select the FreeBSD partition and hit the ‘S’ key which will set it to bootable (can also do this sort of thing in fdisk for dos and other partition management apps)
3. Then hit the ‘W’ key to write it out
4. Choose to install the FreeBSD boot mananger from the popup menu
5. Reboot

You will now have your FreeBSD boot manager back!