> > recent freebsd ISOs no longer work with memdisk. if copied to a thumb > drive it boots for either efi or bios. might you clarify how you'd boil > down the iso to distill a grub entry that works, preferably also for either > efi or bios? Yes, this makes sense (needing no ramdisk when booting from a thumb drive). I do not have an ISO handy to look in it myself. Mount it (loopback) to something like /mnt/tmp and go in there and see what it does. You should be able to locate the kernel (in what would be [ROOT_FS]/boot for example). You will find where all the startup scripts are; the "/" where they would live is what your root filessytem will be for the GRUB entry. I am thinking a GRUB1 entry that looks like one of these two: title Slackware64 14.1 gflat root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-3.10.17_slackwareIN ro root=/dev/sda3 rhgb title Slackware64 14.1 vr root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-3.10.17_slackwareIN ro root=/dev/sda2 rhgb Points to the very first partition for finding all of its crap, then kicks in that 3.10.17 kernel that I built, and uses /dev/sda2 as the root fs. I love GRUB1. Simple and reliable if you do not need EFi.