ericbsd hmmm, if with ZFS and on same drive, then I m doin something wrong but totally clueless... well, as long as 24.04.x runs, I ll keep searching...
but: Eric, can You tell me, what You choose within GhostBSD installer for the GhostBSD-part?
I d keep the Windows 10 part, am on UEFI and can I keep GPT or what shd it be for dual booting Win10/GBSD?

23 days later

Eric, before trying another dual-boot on my desktop machine: what would be the best configuration either with BIOS and in GhostBSD installer to achieve Windows (10/11) and Ghost side by side on same disk?
BIOS is now on UEFI, Installed Windows first and have GBSD on UFS right now.
Is there a chance to switch to ZFS, keep Windows installed and use rEFind as the preferred boot manager on same disk? As I still couldn t get in running that way?
disk ada0 is running in GPT mode, with efi partition plus two windows and two freebsd/GhostBSD partitions as UFS...

    Folks, let me tell you, dual-booting sounds great. "Oh, I’ll have Windows! I’ll have BSD! It’ll be wonderful!" But guess what? It’s NOT wonderful. It’s a total mess. A disaster. The worst!

    You shut down Windows, right? Looks fine. But then you boot into BSD, BOOM! Windows left things in a bad state. Dirty shutdowns, folks. Very bad. It starts running CHKDSK, throwing errors, maybe even corrupting data. And BSD? Same deal. You leave a ZFS pool in a weird state, reboot into Windows, good luck! Windows doesn’t know what to do with it. It’s confused, and confusion is BAD.

    Now, you think, “I’ll just reboot.” But NO! Windows Update decides to run. Takes forever. Doesn’t care about BSD. And BSD? BSD’s just sitting there, waiting. It’s sad!

    And let’s talk about EFI bootloaders, what a mess. Windows likes to say, "I'm in charge now." It overwrites your BSD entry. Next thing you know, you're stuck in Windows, begging to get your bootloader back. Tragic. Absolutely tragic.

    So what’s the solution? Simple: DON’T DUAL-BOOT. Get another disk. Another machine. Virtualize if you have to. But putting two operating systems on the same disk? That’s like letting two New York real estate developers share the same building, one of them is getting EVICTED.

    Folks, dual-booting is a RISK. You don’t want it. I don’t want it. It’s a total disaster. Make BSD great, run it on its own drive! Believe me.

      firmament I just asked Eric for his dual-boot hints, as it once worked very well and he said, he managed to do it again, even on ZFS based partitioning. I don t want to end in chaos, panic or theatrical speech again, had that enough on Telegram. I just want a stable system, that doesn t need re-installing all the time. And due to lack of money for a machine with two disks or another way of "dual-disking" I switched to Virtual machine alternative anyway... I just wanted to know, that s all...

        hank2121 Listen, folks, here’s the deal. You want stability? Use GhostBSD as it was intended! No need for all this dual-booting madness, complex setups, or reinstalling over and over. It's a waste of time! Absolute disaster.

        GhostBSD is designed to be simple, reliable, and just work, so let it work! No need to fight it. Virtual machines? Fine, if that’s your thing. But if you’re running GhostBSD, run it properly. No need for the unnecessary complications. Smart people keep it simple.

        At the end of the day, you want stability? Stick to what works. Stick to GhostBSD as it was meant to be. You'll thank me later!

        Look, it's very simple. If you can’t afford another hard drive, then you can’t afford computing as it was intended. That’s just reality. Hard drives are cheap, folks. If you're trying to make things work with one disk and a dozen complicated setups, you're fighting against the system. Bad idea. Very bad.

        Computing was meant to be fast, efficient, and stable. Not some mess of partitions, reinstalls, and band-aid solutions. If you want real stability, you need the right hardware. That’s just the way it is. No excuses. Invest in what works, or deal with instability.

        Bottom line? If you can’t get the right tools, you’re not doing it right. Simple as that.

        hank2121 I triple GhostBSD with Windows 10 and Ubuntu MATE. The only OS that has problems for me is Ubuntu MATE. It constantly redoes my boot order.

        I do not understand why you can't get that to work. The partition editor makes it easy to create the ZFS partition. You just need to create the partition, but if Windows created your EFI partition, it is possible your EFI partition is too small.

          ericbsd aaah, alright, the size of EFI partition maybe... ok, I ll give it some tests on the desktop, and if it breaks the Ghost 24.04 one I ll restart with Windows 11 and Ghost as I need to upgrade Windoze sooner or later anyway.... But the installer did everything but when rebooting I always could only boot into Windows, Ghost wasn t there in rEFind as an option.. AND: the rEFind option was greyed out BTW. With ZFS chosen, I could only use BSD boot manager and got into Windows. we ll see. But thx for updating in here...

          Bringing back GRUB support could be beneficial. Should we consider it? GRUB is already available in pc-sysinstall. Replacing rEFInd with GRUB might improve user satisfaction. Just a thought.

          rEFInd is one of the few remaining TrueOS components that could be deprecated. We’ve been gradually removing TrueOS artifacts from GhostBSD, and over time, all TrueOS elements will likely be phased out.

          Grub is more of a problem than anything else. GhostBSD used to have Grub, and it was a problem to maintain.

            2 months later

            ericbsd I agree with Eric. And as long as it is possible to choose rEFind in GBSD installer (not greyed out) AND have the choice to boot whatever You want (ok, maybe not Plan 9 haha), then rEFind is my 1st choice to use, never regreted it...

              hank2121 Ensure that your BIOS is configured to use EFI (UEFI) mode rather than Legacy mode whenever possible.

                vimanuelt that s what I did, otherwise trouble is mostly programmed... ;-) but with dual-boot, it got stuck on this Portege laptop, maybe due to a different configuration/environment of this "old" boy, but I solved it with VM s anyway and it works - let minor flaws like only 8GB RAM aside - pretty well...