Dual boot WinXP and FreeBSD 5.3

Adam Fabian afabian at austin.rr.com
Wed Dec 29 22:05:42 PST 2004


On Mon, Dec 27, 2004 at 04:44:28PM -0700, Tom Connolly wrote:
> Hello list.  I wish to put FreeBSD 5.3 on a new hard drive and have it
> dual boot with the existing Windows XP system (separate HD).  Can I just
> simply go through the FreeBSD install and have it install the FreeBSD
> boot manager/loader on the XP drive?  I can't risk doing any damage to
> the XP system as it has a thermal analyzer program on it that won't run

If you try to set up dual-boot, you're risking doing damage to the XP
system.  In any case whatsoever.  If you're inexperienced, the risk is
actually pretty high.  

> on FreeBSD (otherwise I would have no use for XP at all).  I would like
> to know if there are any "gotchas" or anything that could be a problem.
> I would really like to hear comments from anyone who has set up such a
> system.

Utilities from the DOS/Windows world are frequently stupid and make
stupid assumptions, like you only have one big, primary partition and
you run one operating system, and might be hazy about telling you
which partition and disk they're going to act on.  (And it will always
be the one you don't want it to.)  Even if you're using UNIX
utilities, 0-9 and a-z are very susceptible to one letter off typos;
if you don't have a full disk image, or are not willing to reinstall
everything on the system from scratch, do not even try to make a
dual-boot system.  The whole process is a "gotcha"; the architecture
wasn't designed with dual-boot in mind.

I found the GAG boot manager to be pretty easy and intuitive.
-- 
Adam Fabian (afabian at austin.rr.com)


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