WinXP and FreeBSD configuration problems

[Ryan Sommers]

dmwassman at cox.net said:
> ad0s0		NTFS		2G	#Windows Boot
> ad0s1		FreeBSD	2G	#FreeBSD Boot/Swap
> ad0s3		FAT		20G	#Windows
> ad0s4		FreeBSD	298G	#FreeBSD
>

... extra stuff eliminated ...

Why the miniscule 2gb partitions? Honestly, they are pointless. Second,
worrying about the performance of boot and swap on a computer with a 320GB
harddrive? Again pointless. If you are worried about the performance of
your swap space I would rethink running Windows XP because you have way
too little RAM. Third, why are you making seperate partitions for boot and
swap anyway?

>From here on out I'm going to revert to the BSD style where you say
partition I will now call it a slice.

FreeBSD can reside on a single slice. The BSD disklabel'er divides the
FreeBSD slice into partitions, for things like swap, and file-systems.

My recommendations to you are as follows:

1) Don't worry about where things are on the disk. You're complicating the
hell out of everything and in the end you probably won't notice a
difference. If you're that worried about performance invest in multiple
SCSI disks and create multiple RAID arrays optimized for performance.

2) Don't worry about making seperate slices (the things you can only make
4 of).

3) Make a single slice for Windows and install it there. It's good to make
it the first slice on the disk, but not necessary. Then install FreeBSD to
another slice. Let FreeBSD overwrite the MBR with the standard boot
manager.

This has worked countless times for me. I've always dual booted my laptops
with FreeBSD and a Windows OS.

Just me .02. If you'd like feel free to contact me personally and I'd be
glad to help you get started.

-- 
Ryan Sommers
ryans at gamersimpact.com