On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 12:33:37PM -0700, Dino Vliet wrote: > Dear Debian folks, > > currently I have installed FreeBSD 6 and Ubuntu Breezy on my AMD 64 system. Everything worked fine, but I decided to upgrade my Ubuntu partition. Due to EOL of Breezy, the difficult upgrade method of Ubuntu amd-64, the fact that I am curious about Debian and I can't loose anything on my FreeBSD partition, I decided to install Debian Etch in stead of the Ubuntu partition. Well, that will help with the future upgrades as Debian upgrades are remarkable smooth. > > However, as I want to make sure everything goes smooth here are some facts about the situation here and I hope you guys can give me a push in the right direction. > > 1) I'm using grub on Ubuntu to choose which OS to boot (I've edited some grub configuration files under /etc to let it recognize freebsd) ok > 2) I already backed up most important files on my FreeBSD partition, but the be honest I hope the installation of debian goes so smooth that I won't need the hassle of restoring everything by hand. If you reasonable know what you're doing, and I'd gues you do, then you should have no problems. The debian partitioner can be customised easily to leave your FreeBSD partitions alone. The rest should be smooth. > > The questions I have are: > 1) Will I need to reinstall grub and edit it again to let it recognize FreeBSD? Or can I choose not to insall grub and will the old one from ubuntu just kick in and let me boot debian instead (I don't think it would be as easy as it sounds) If you are comfortable with grub at all, then I would by pass the grub-install and boot the first time by hand. Then edit the /boot/menu.lst fix it up for both debian and freebsd. You might save a copy of your old menu.lst for reference. > 2) What are the chances of everything going smooth? I want to know if there are risks because I really like the FreeBSD partition and I invested a lot of time to get it the way I want it. Are there risks? sure. Will it go smoothly? probably, but it depends on 1) how careful you are (i.e. *read* the messages, don't just hit enter), and 2) your general knowledge level. Remember, plenty of total n00bs install debian alongside windows with success. You are already familiar with *nix and since BSD will run on anything, you should be alright. A
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