Questions on first-time installation

Jan Grant jan.grant at bristol.ac.uk
Wed Nov 8 15:48:25 UTC 2006


On Wed, 8 Nov 2006, Bob Schwartz wrote:

>  >>Be really careful. The windows boot loader should be able to boot a
> freebsd install for you.<,
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Either one works for me as long as I get full choice. If the windows loader
> simply picks up bsd and offers it in addition to the two windows installs
> that I need, no problem. Ditto if the bsd boot manager hands me off to the
> windows boot manager and gives me both choices.
> 
> My concern...and I was going to write the group and ask...is that bsd's
> manager only returns one of the windows systems.
> 
> What do you think, please?

The dell box I have at home boots using the NT/XP boot manager, that 
Just Works.

> >> Dell usually ship their machines with a small partition at the front of
> the drive (at least, they did last time I received one). That partition is
> at an odd offset and didn't agree with the FBSD partition editor: I found
> this out the hard way. Things may have changed since then; I usually nuke
> the dell partition anyway.<<
> 
> They still do...and while I could nuke it, now that I have windows installs
> that I don't want to disturb, I am afraid to.
> 
> If I leave them there, what, in your experience, happens?

Like I said, this experience is a few years old, but the fbsd partition 
manager wound up having problems and screwed the partition table. On the 
other hand, if you create an fdisk partition inside windows and don't do 
any fdisk editing from the freebsd install, just label and install into 
the precreated slice, you should be ok. Usual provisos apply: back up, 
and if at all possible try it first on some scratch kit.

G'luck,
jan

-- 
jan grant, ISYS, University of Bristol. http://www.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44 (0)117 3317661   http://ioctl.org/jan/
Leverage that synergy! Ooh yeah, looking good! Now stretch - and relax.


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