free

[Dan Strick]

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 08:44:44 -0700 (PDT), dauda braimah wrote:
>>
> How do I install freebsd and another Os in a pc with
> 2gigabyte hdd disk eg Window XP and freebsd.
>
> How do I format a system that has freebsd 4.5 in it
>>

I strongly recommend against trying to shoehorn XP and FreeBSD onto
a 2 GB disk.  Windows XP requires about 1 GB plus 1.5 times as much
disk space as you have main memory for a swapfile.  If you have
enough main memory (so that you never have to swap) you can save
space by deleting the swap file after Windows XP is installed.
You can also choose not to install all the possible parts of FreeBSD.
I don't know how much space you can reasonably save.  I install
everything and after building a bunch of ports I find that I am
using almost 1.8 GB in the /usr partition (including /usr/local
but not /usr/ports).  Given that modern disk drives cost only about
$1 per GB, the extra effort required to fit both OS onto a 2 GB
disk is just not worth it.

In any case, if you insist on trying this anyway, I would install
XP first.  If possible, I would pre-create an empty 1+ GB type 11
MBR partition (DOS or Windows 95 with 32 bit FAT) and zero it,
leaving the rest of the disk unused.  Otherwise I would use the
XP installation program to set up the disk and try to convince
it to allocate only 1 GB or so for XP.  Try to make sure it
creates a Fat32 file system and not a FAT16 or NTFS file system
(because FAT16 is too inefficient and FreeBSD cannot reliably
write into NTFS file systems).  Then I would install FreeBSD in
the rest of the disk, installing only the minimum amount of
software that I needed and not expecting to install much if any
additional software afterwards.  Don't even think about loading
an elaborate GUI.  You can install X11 and if TWM is not enough
you can try something like FVWM.  During the FreeBSD disk setup
phase, I would install the usual FreeBSD MBR bootstrap program
on top of whatever XP installed.

This won't be an issue with a 2 GB disk, but I would try to insure
that the FreeBSD root partition lies within the first 8 GB of the
the disk in order to avoid various bootstrap configuration problems.

Dan Strick