Mucking with other drive

Jerry McAllister jerrymc at clunix.cl.msu.edu
Thu Mar 17 08:03:58 PST 2005


> 
> Jerry,
> 
> Well, of course it's going to "muck with the other drive" what
> do you think writing the MBR does?  Do you want to risk the MS system
> not booting?  95% of the time it will work OK but what if her system
> is in that 5% of the time that it doesen't?  You going to go
> over to her house and fix it?  What if she's got some nutty drive
> program on there like diskmanager that neither of you know about that
> is already on the mbr?

Well, that is true.   That is what I said - except for writing the MBR,
which is mucking with that other drive, but not installing other stuff
over the top of things.   I don't know about those percentages.  I have 
never run in to that situation and had it fail.  Make sure you copy all 
impossible to replace files before doing anything like that anyway.
So, where does Carrie live?   Can I drive there?

> Carrie,
> 
> PC bioses only let you boot off of drive C.  If you install this
> other drive as drive D then during the installation FreeBSD is going
> to have to write a boot loader onto C so that when the PC boots
> it will load the boot loader, which will then load the FreeBSD system
> off drive D.

Yup.

> You need to leave well enough alone.  You can pick up older PC's for a
> song
> these days.  If you have critical data on your Dell then don't
> screw with it.  Find some other PC that someone's going to throw away
> and load FreeBSD on that.  You don't even need a monitor for it, you
> can telnet/ssh into it from your Dell system easily.

Sure, if you have that opportunity.    But, I'd rather reboot and
have use of a decently fast recent machine than consign myself to
an old slow clunker for one or the other systems.

> 
> Dual-boot systems never work anyway.  The operator always ends up
> spending 99% of their time in one operating system.

Well, if you get used to FreeBSD, probably you will stick with
that most of the time to get any work done.   But, I find on 
this machine, I use both of the OSen pretty much every day.
That is mostly because I have to interact with people who need
things in MS.
But, dual boot does work and work quite well, actually.    

////jerry

> 
> Ted
> 


More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list