FreeBSD beside WinXP

[Kent Stewart]

On Thursday 20 November 2003 04:49 pm, chael at southgate.ph.inter.net wrote:
> Thanks for all the replies. And yes, that's what my FAT32 is for... sort of
> a mediator for the different OSes which also contains important files but
> no directories for working applications.
>
> Ok, let me get this in short. You basically recommend me to follow this
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/disks.html#NT-BOOTLOAD
>ER ?

The boot.ini on that page is a copy of most of my boot.ini's. A number of us 
were trying various solutions and one of the docs-commiters distilled the 
essentials from everyone's comments into that page. I like using ntldr 
because I can set the boot to FreeBSD, tell XP to restart and go grab 
something to drink. When I come back, FreeBSD will be running.

>
> If I want to copy that /boot/boot1 from my FreeBSD partion to my drive C:\,
> how can I get to my FreeBSD partition, in the first place, if I won't be
> able to boot from it after installation? (because I assume the above steps
> would require you not to touch your MBR while installing FreeBSD). Can I
> create a boot disk to boot that FreeBSD?

You don't touch the mbr but FreeBSD will set its partition as the active one. 
When you want to run XP, you just have to set it back to your c-drive as the 
active one. You can mount your 10GB partition and copy /boot/boot1 on to it 
or mount the cd on XP and copy it there before you start. If you have a 
bootsec.bsd in your boot.ini, FreeBSD will just automagically run when you 
choose it.

Kent

>
> Thanks.
>
> >On Thursday 20 November 2003 05:14 am, ogautherot at freesurf.fr wrote:
> >> As far as I am concerned, I tend to have 1 partition for the system and
> >> a separate one for user data - this way, you don't wipe everything out
> >> if your system crashes. This saved my life a couple of times.
> >>
> >> What do you need the 10GB FAT32 partition for? (I suspect the same
>
> purpose
>
> >> but with respect to Windows...?!?)
> >
> >If you want to pass large files, you need something you can write to from
> >FreeBSD. You can read but not write to NTFS. I have a number of mutli-boot
> >machines and I almost always have that much in one partition that is
> > FAT32.
> >
> >FWIW, all of my multi-boot XP/FreeBSD have the main FreeBSD slice on the
> >primary master. You can add /boot/boot0 to your c-drive and boot.ini and
>
> 5.x
>
> >or 4.x boots like a charm using ntldr. My c-drive only contains data and
>
> does
>
> >not contain an OS.
> >
> >Kent
>
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-- 
Kent Stewart
Richland, WA

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