Dual boot with windows xp and freebsd

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> On Wednesday 30 April 2003 23:28, 1 at bendcable.com wrote:
> > I would like to setup a partition on my Toshiba laptop to put FreeBSD
> > on.  I currently have windows xp that I would like to keep. How can I
> > dual boot with FreeBSD without loosing windows xp?
> Actually, installing the FreeBSD BootMgr when prompted during Installation 
> should do the trick.

Also, be careful about keeping partition and slice straight.
What is called slice in the BSD world is called partition in 
the MS world.   Then, in the BSD world, slices can be further divided 
in to partitions.  

So you want to install FreeBSD in a separate slice on the disk.   
Within that slice you will probably want partitions for root, swap,
/tmp, /usr, maybe /var and /home or some such.   Or you might want to
put some of these beyond root on a second disk - depending on where
you have space.

If you do not have a slice (MS partition) already made to hold
the FreeBSD install and the XP slice uses up all of the current
disk space (minus what the hardware vendor leaves for diagnostics, etc), 
you will need to use a utililty to squeeze the MS-XP slice down to 
make room for it.   I have successfully used Partition Magic.  There
are others.   Partition Magic is not free, but it is not expensive and
is available in stores such as Best Buy and online retailers.  It has 
the advantage of being able to handle NTFS type disk systems that like
to come with XP and Win2K which some of the others and especially freeware
ones do not know how to handle yet.  

Note that the boot manager (MBR) mentioned above replaces any boot
manager that MS-XP put there and that is good.   It will know how 
to boot either the XP slice (partition in MS words) and the FreeBSD
slice as long as those slices are marked as bootable and have a
boot block in the right place.  The Xp slice already has one and
the FreeBSD installer will put one in the FreeBSD slice for you.

The FreeBSD standard boot manager will then offer you a selection
at boot time of which slice to boot from.  Unfortunately, so far
it doesn't have an internal name for XP so it identifies it as ???.
But, it still works fine.

Also, keep track of the terminology about boot records.   Every bootable
slice has to have a boot block.  The boot device (disk - determined by
the BIOS) also has to have a boot manager if there are more than one
bootable slices to select from.   Unfortunarely the terms sound a little
similar since they all have the word 'boot' in them and people tend to
be rather sloppy and don't distinguish between them well in talking
or writing about them.

Good luck,

////jerry

> 
> Greetings
> Flo
> -- 
> http://www.bsdforen.de
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