Trouble setting up multiple boot on big disk

Kent Stewart kstewart at owt.com
Fri Aug 29 21:21:48 PDT 2003


On Friday 29 August 2003 08:52 pm, Brett Glass wrote:
> I'm setting up a laptop which will need to dual-boot Windows 2000
> Server (ugh!) and FreeBSD. I partitioned the large (60 GB) hard disk
> so that there was an 18 GB NTFS partition at the beginning, followed
> by a 20 GB partition for data, followed by an 18 GB partition for
> FreeBSD. But when I attempted to install FreeBSD, the disk labeling
> utility wouldn't let me divide the 18 GB partition (or "slice," in
> traditional UNIX parlance) into file systems ("partitions" in UNIX
> parlance). I get an error message that says I can't do it because
> something's "too big."
>
> What limitation am I hitting, and how do I get around it?

Make sure that W2K left space and you aren't using what is left of an 
extended partition. I just installed FreeBSD 4.8 on to a 80 GB so that 
isn't the problem.

On my W2K machines, I make them all primary and "basic". Getting them to 
be basic partition instead of the dynamic one that it wants to use was 
a problem. I don't remember at what point I converted the new 2nd 
partition in to a basic and primary. It was an option from the left 
side of the disk manager. There is a button for each disk that has 
something like "Disk 0", "Disk 1", and etc.

Kent

-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

http://users.owt.com/kstewart/index.html



More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list