Dual Booting GhostBSD & Linux Mint 22 Legacy Bios

mstuckless

Hi all,

I am trying to get GhostBSD to work on a disk that already has Linux Mint 22 on it in sda2 with sda1 being location of grub. The pc is quite old and has legacy bios (UEFI not possible). I have installed Linux Mint (legacy bios mode) to sda2 and grub in MBR. I then installed GhostBSD on another empty part of the drive. The installation created an sda3 (freebsd boot), sda4 (zfs), sda5 ( freebsd swap). I was then able to boot into ghostbsd but not into Linux. So I used a liveusb of linux mint to run boot repair so I can boot into the linux partition. But now, I can't get back into GhostBSD. I watched videos, tried editing 40_custom file for grub, tried chatgpt, tried using Grub Customizer to add entries for GhostBSD to get it to boot, but to no avail. I run into various errors depending on the code like invalid signature, invalid device, load the kernel first, etc, with the various parameters I have tried (chainloader +1). I confess I am a total noob on a lot of this, so I have come here looking for help. Thanks in advance.

vimanuelt

GhostBSD requires UEFI.

ericbsd

vimanuelt That is not accurate. If it boots to the DE from the live session, GhostBSD supports it.

@mstuckless, can you share your Grub configuration?

Robin

I didn't imagine that GhostBSD requires UEFI, since I too am using only legacy BIOS on this old, ancient Dell machine.

I'm fortunate to have a second HDD so I don't ever need to dual-boot, just choose which HDD to boot from in the BIOS. For @mstuckless I would only offer this: Try a "portable hard drive," and use it for GhostBSD on it's own. Triple-booting from a single HDD is challenging enough, but mixing a ZFS-based BSD with two other Linux OSes may be asking too much.

mstuckless

Robin I will see if I can dig up an old HD, but I'd like to keep trying for a bit more. In the end, this is what I may do. Thanks.

mstuckless

ericbsd

Here are results of sudo fdisk -l (from Linux Mint):"

Disk /dev/sda: 465.76 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: WDC WD5001AALS-0
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt

Device         Start       End   Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sda1       2048  20482047  20480000  9.8G BIOS boot
/dev/sda2   20482048 584693759 564211712  269G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda3         40       551       512  256K FreeBSD boot
/dev/sda4  584693760 972574719 387880960  185G FreeBSD ZFS
/dev/sda5  972574720 976769023   4194304    2G FreeBSD swap

Partition table entries are not in disk order.

Here is gparted screenshot:"
https://tinypic.host/image/Screenshot-at-2024-12-15-10-56-07.24FxP9

I've been using Grub Customizer and this is the entry suggested through using the Chainloader option when creating a new Grub entry:

set root='(hd0,4)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 15713401790920940677
drivemap -s (hd0) ${root}
chainloader +1

Thanks for any and all help.

ericbsd

I have not used Grub in a while, but a configuration should look similar to this.

menuentry "GhostBSD" {
    insmod zfs
    set root=(hd0,2)
    chainloader +1
}

vimanuelt

Thanks for the correction. I apologize. I'm confusing my installer with Eric's installer. The partitioning.py file in gbi supports both non-UEFI and UEFI.

ericbsd

vimanuelt No worries.

mstuckless

Looks like maybe I am in gpt mode even though I thought I was in MBR???

ericbsd

@mstuckless, I reformated your post. You should be able to copy and paste the images from your post.

You can try this:

menuentry "GhostBSD" {
    insmod part_gpt
    insmod zfs
    set root=(hd0,gpt3)
    chainloader +1
}

mstuckless

Tried what you suggested. I get an "invalid signature" error message.

Thanks for trying. I'm going to see if I can get another hard drive and then just use bios to switch between the two systems as needed and as already suggested. Might save me some headaches down the road. Thanks.

ericbsd

mstuckless the configuration I give you can be wrong. I have not used Grub in a long time.

hank2121

ericbsd wasn t there a problem with dual-boot and ZFS (GhostBSD) anyway, with or without legacy mode?
I tried installing a newer GhostBSD besides Windows 10, that doesnt support UFS anymore and was never able to install a dual-boot on one disk anymore. That s why I switched to VirtualBox for add. systems in the 1st place.

mstuckless

I'm sure its probably do-able if we kept at it, but I found an old drive from a laptop that still works and I have successfully loaded it with GhostBSD and I am using the bios to switch between booting into one or the other. Thanks for trying to help.

I did try one of the BSD's some years ago, but found it difficult. GhostBSD seems like a friendlier version so far in spite of my dual-boot difficulties. I probably should have gotten rid of this particular PC some years ago, but I tend to be frugal and like to keep things working and also fiddling with plugging away to learn new things. This pc has a BFG GeForce 9800 GTX in it and I was going to see if I could get some older games running on it under BSD. Linux Mint 22 has dropped support for older nvidia cards (you have to use the open source nouveau driver) and I believe GhostBSD still supports using the nvidia-driver-340. Now we will see if I can get that working too.

Robin

I'm a believer in the old expression,

If it Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It!

I have an ancient - like one step up from an abacus or something - 32-bit 'puter that runs better than new with antiX on it. No desktop environment per se, but plenty graphical with just a window manager, tint2 panel and apps that don't require a zillion and twelve terrabytes of RAM. The problem is the web, the games, all the stuff written in the 21st century requires more CPU amd RAM than ever before. They really should be going the other way, I would think, in the interest of preserving energy for the good of the planet and all that stuff.

I;m not looking forward to Wayland, I can tell you that, because of what it does to Xfce 4.20 (just released). It wasn't broke, didn't need fixing.

mstuckless

Everything working well now. Nvidia graphics card too. Are there any "must have" utilities or programs that you recommend a first-time BSD user should install?

Thanks in advance.

vimanuelt

mstuckless Well, here are some applications that many people have requested to be installed by default in the past:
audacity
bash
filezilla
gimp
inkscape
kdenlive
libreoffice (or openoffice)
linux-rl9
obs-studio
simplescreenrecorder
sylpheed
ungoogled-chromium
virtualbox-ose
webcamoid

I'm sure I missed a few.

Robin

The defaults included with GhostBSD were chosen for their familiarity or simplicity for us new users. When I wanted alternatives to some of the default applications they were easy to find, and all of them were available in Software Station except one - Brave browser. After installing a bunch of "Linux-compatibiliyu" stuff just to make Brave work in BSD, I decided it wasn't worth all the trouble and Brave isn't any better than ungoogled-chromium, my new default browser.

In Software Station if you check "search descriptions" and on the left select "show descriptions," it gets to looking a lot like Synaptic Package Manager in Debian/Ubuntu. Searching with those options ON makes finding software much easier.

mstuckless

Thanks for replies everyone! I'll check out the suggestions made and also tweak the Software Station for better searching.

ericbsd

hank2121 Not that I know, I dual boot with ZFS.