install & partitioning advice needed

[Lowell Gilbert]

"baldyeti" <e_fax_t at hotmail.com> writes:

> Using a FreeBSD 4.6 CD I have, I'd like to install on an
> older system (P200). The machine has a 4 GB IDE drive and
> another 4 Gb attached via SCSI. These seem to be recognised
> as da0 and ad0.

[Vice versa, actually...]

>                 The SCSI adapter has no ROM, and is not
> directly bootable. I thus suppose FreeBSD - and any OS under
> the circumstances - needs at least one little boot slice on
> the 1st (IDE) drive. I could free about 400 Mb on that drive,
> in an extended partition. Can FreeBSD be started from an
> extended partition, or will it need a primary one, and which
> filesystem(s) needs reside on the startup disk, with which
> recommended minimum size?

FreeBSD can't boot out of a "logical partition".  You probably could
install to the second disk, and just boot from a boot manager
installed on the first disk, or from floppies.  These are a bit tricky
for beginners, though.  

With release 4.6, you could easily get away with a 50MB root partition
on the first drive.  4.6 is distinctly outdated, though.  Your easiest
path is probably to go with a fairly smart bootloader.  I understand
that "GAG" is pretty good: http://gag.sourceforge.net/