Installing FreeBSD with Windows XP

[Chris Whitehouse]

Jerry McAllister wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 10:19:00PM +0000, Chris Whitehouse wrote:
> 
>> Jerry McAllister wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 01:05:42PM -0800, tsai wrote:
>>>
>>>> Jerry,
>>>>
>>>> You read my mind.  That was going to be my next question; how to get 
>>>> around
>>>> the proprietary recovery section HP installed from the start.  You hit the
>>>> nail on the head!  I will try this soon.
>>> Yup.   Basically, you just ignore it, leave it alone - anyway as long 
>>> as MS-SP isn't bothered by it.
>>>
>>> ////jerry
>> I have a HP laptop which came with a recovery partition. I don't have 
>> windows on the laptop now but I used to and:
>>
>> a) somewhere there is a utility to make recovery dvds which do the same 
>> job so you can remove the recovery partition.
>> b) there is a HP backup and recovery utility - you might have to install 
>> it from the HP software. There is an option to remove the recovery 
>> partition with it.
> 
> 
> Sure, you can nuke the vendor maintenance slice if you want to and get
> rid of the MS stuff as well at the same time.   But, the OP seemed to
> want to keep those and add FreeBSD to the system.
> 
> ////jerry


I meant to suggest that you can put the recovery slice onto DVD to 
reclaim an additional 5gb disk space. So my whole procedure would be

- create backup dvd's (with the HP backup and recovery manager software 
if I'm right in thinking that's where this utility lives). Test them!
- get rid of the recovery slice using the backup and recovery manager. 
XP should now be the first slice (primary partition) if it wasn't already
- use gparted or other suitable utility to shrink the XP slice
- install FreeBSD in the new free space.

If the laptop is still under warranty you probably need to be able to 
reinstall it to factory state before you can talk to them about a 
warranty claim - hence the recovery dvd's.

Chris