dualboot, first fbsd, then xp

[Alex de Kruijff]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 10:15:05PM +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2003 at 10:40:48PM +0200, Tobias Roth wrote:
> 
> > Is it save to install WinXP after FreeBSD? My IBM recovery cd goofed
> > up my WinXP and I'd like to reinstall XP only and keep my existing
> > FreeBSD slices intact. Same goes for the MBR, of course.
> > 
> > And yes, I will back up my data in any case, but I'd still hate it if
> > I had to set up my whole system again.
> 
> It's safe enough, in that the WinXP install will not gratuitously chew
> up your FreeBSD partitions unless you tell it to.  However, it will
> probably overwrite the MBR, thus effectively hiding your FreeBSD
> installation.  You can recover by booting up from your FreeBSD
> installation media, choosing the Fixit mode and re-installing the
> FreeBSD boot manager from there -- see the boot0cfg(8) man page for
> details.
> 
> Hmmm... It's a long time since I had any dealings with a Microsoft OS,
> but I seem to remember that they always preferred to go in the first
> partition (slice, in FreeBSD parlance) on the drive.  Dunno if that's
> still true.
> 

That goes for most OS out there. If the boot record are at a certain 
.... (fill in the rigth unity and value) then the system simply don't
startup. FreeBSD has some filesystems that you wanna have a the front
of the disk because of the performance. I recond the best thing to do 
is create tree or four partions. Two for FreeBSD and one or two for 
XP.

The first partions holds / (128M) , the swap (2x mem, of 1x mem if you 
got two disks) and /var (256M). The secord partion hold the XP fs. The 
thirth hold the rest of FreeBSD fs and the fourth old more for XP if you 
are likly to experiance problems. (aka have the second partion in the 
dainger zone)

Alex