Ordeal By OtherBSD

[Frank Mitchell]

Hi again:

I experimented with Multi Booting various BSD flavours.

Looks like I spoke too soon about NetBSD. I tried installing the latest NetBSD 
Release and it seemed there was no way to stop it affecting the FreeBSD 
Slice, which then appeared to have been wiped clean. So it looks inadvisable 
to install NetBSD unless you plan to reinstall FreeBSD completely afterwards.

I tried OpenBSD to see if that fared any better. OpenBSD tries to mount other 
Slices too, warning that all data will be deleted. I managed to avoid this 
and kept my FreeBSD alive, but I was lucky. If you don't have experience with 
OpenBSD's unfriendly Fdisk and Disklabel Editor, you risk losing your entire 
Hard Disk configuration. And you need to ensure you keep your FreeBSD Boot 
Selector, because OpenBSD doesn't provide one.

Then I tried a DragonFly install, which was buggy but harmless. However, while 
the DragonFly Boot Selector can start FreeBSD, it emerges that the FreeBSD 
Boot Selector won't necessarily start DragonFly.

Note that all these OtherBSDs still allowed me to multiboot Linux Distros in 
the DOS Extended Partition. This was possible because OpenSuse lets you put 
GRUB in a Custom Boot Partition, which in my case is the Ext2 Slice reserved 
for Data.

Yours truly: Frank Mitchell