Installing Windows *after* FreeBSD

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 04 Nov 2014 21:55:11 +0100, Christian Baer wrote:
> At times, I still like gaming and although I do not spend most of my computer 
> time doing that, I did leave some room on my SSD for Windows. To be exact, I 
> created three primary partitions (MBR style, Win7 is a pain with UEFI), one 
> 100MB, one ~120GB (these two are for Windows) and one ~118GB for FreeBSD.

Depending on what games you prefer, you could try the following
in order to avoid an installation of "Windows":

a) run the games with wine (I'm doing this, actually)

b) create a VM and run "Windows" games inside that

If both do _not_ provide a sufficient environment for your
games, you probably need to install it on your hard disk.



> My problem is that should I install Windows now, FreeBSD won't boot anymore, 
> because Windows will replace the boot loader.

Correct. You should therefore first install "Windows" and
then FreeBSD. If you have installed FreeBSD previously,
you need to boot from a live CD or USB stick and repair
the damaged MBR, and also install the boot manager so
you can select to boot the OS or "Windows".



> If there is any documentation 
> about using FreeBSD and Windows on one machine, it usually assumes that 
> Windows was installed first.

Yes, because it's less trouble. :-)



> Does anybody know of some documentation or howto to install these two OSs the 
> other way around? As you can imagine, I don't really fancy the idea of 
> starting from scratch here.

Boot from a different media and repair what "Windows"
has damaged.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...