Help needed please - Thinkpad A31p & FreeBSD 4.8 Installation (LONG)

[Pisut Tempatarachoke]

Hi,

I've just got my TP A31p and now look forward to installing FreeBSD
4.8 (4-CDROM set) on it.  I'm very new to FreeBSD and really hope
someone could give me some advices.  Thanks a lot in advance.

The laptop has no floppy drive and came with a 60 GB hard drive which
consisted of two FAT32 partitions (slices):
- 55 GB Windows XP Pro and
- 5 GB IBM recovery partition.
I used BootIT NG to shrink the XP partition down to 23 GB.  This left
me with a free space of 32 GB.  Then, I created a 9 GB FAT32 partition
within the free space hoping to use it as a data partition which can
be read and written from both XP and FreeBSD.  So, now I have
- 23 GB Windows XP Pro
- 9 GB FAT32 for sharing data between OS's
- 21 GB free space (unformatted) for FreeBSD (I havn't installed it
yet) and
- 5 GB IBM recovery partition

???My first questions - Is this a sound method of slicing my disk?
Does the 9 GB FAT32 partition really need to be there?  Am I wrong in
thinking that FAT32 is accessible from both XP and FreeBSD?

I've read posts somewhere that I MUST NOT install FreeBSD boot manager
during the installation because it will overwrite the master boot
record (MBR), and as a result XP will be unbootable.  I then must
leave the MBR untouched until I finish with the FreeBSD installation
and copy /boot/boo1 to another computer on a network (A31p doesn't
have a floppy drive).  Then, I have to boot from a FreeBSD CD to enter
FDisk and make sure the XP partition is set bootable.  Reboot it and
once I'm in XP, I can copy /boot/boot1 from the networked computer to
C:\BOOTSECT.BSD and include a line

C:\BOOTSECT.BSD="FreeBSD"

in my BOOT.INI file.  This will give me a boot-from-FreeBSD-slice
option the next time I boot my laptop.

???My second questions - Is this approach workable?  How do I copy
/boot/boot1 to another computer on a network?  Can I copy it onto my 9
GB FAT32 slice instead, as I'm not sure if I will be smart enough to
set up the LAN connection correctly?  Could I write it onto a blank
CD?  What are the commands involved?

???My third questions - Could someone please suggest how I should
partition my FreeBSD slice?  As I have 768 MB RAM, here is what I have
in mind:-
/  512 MB
swap  2048 MB
/var  512 MB
/tmp  1024 MB
/usr  Rest of disk
I have no idea how much disk space I should allocate to /, /var, and
/tmp.  Can I change them at a later stage?  What are UFS and UFS+S and
how are they different?

???Forth question - Is it a good idea to just install everything
during the first installation?  Any recommendations on what I should
or should not install please?

???Last questions - During the monitor configuration stage, I have to
supply the infomation on a) the horizontal sync range, b) the vertical
sync range, and c) the LCD make.  How do I find out this information?
Does anyone with an A31p know please?

Thank you all very very much & any other tips are also welcome.

Best regards

Tempo