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I have a workstation that runs with a dual boot configuration(Ubuntu 9.04 and Win vista(home premium)). Yesterday I tried installing FreeBSD 9.0 over the Ubuntu partition. During the installation you are being prompt to choose between ada0 and ada1(I wanted to use the entire disk) -- win being on ada0 and ubuntu on ada1 so I choose the second option. The installer gives me an error at this point: "Operation cancelled -- pre-check failed".

After this step you are shown the layout of the partitions. In my case it was something like:

    ada0            <#disk size>    MBR
       ada0s1       <#disk size>    ntfs  <== win
    ada1            <#disk size>    freebsd-boot
       ada1p1       64KB            freebsd-boot
       ada1p2       <#disk size>    freebsd-ufs  /
       ada1p3       4.0GB           freebsd-swap none
    da0             1.9GB           BSD
       da0a         534MB           freebsd-ufs

where da0 is a USB which contains the image of freebsd. The installation completes succesfully and the installer recommends rebooting the machine. When I reboot GRUB(installed with ubuntu) gets confused and throws the following error:

 GRUB loading, please wait...
 Error 17

Is there an easy way(without resorting to format the drives and start all over again) to fix the boot entries?

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1 Answer 1

Did you install a FreeBSD boot manager?

There is also a port of grub in ports. You could try to install it and reconfigure the bootmanager.

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