how to set up a dual boot system

[Jud]

Marty Landman wrote:
> At 06:08 PM 2/13/2005, Roland Smith wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, Feb 13, 2005 at 05:40:13PM -0500, Marty Landman wrote:
>> > I have a box with 3 ide's
>> >
>> > primary master - 4 gb, win 98 currently installed @ 150 mb in size
>> >
>> > primary slave - 4 gb, empty
>> >
>> > secondary slave - 6 gb, empty
> 
> 
> 
>> You can install FreeBSD on any harddisk. If you want dual-boot, you'll
>> need to install a boot manager.
> 
> 
> Ok, I understand how to do that much but wasn't sure it could work that 
> way.
> 
>> Usually it's best to install Windows first, because it will overwrite
>> the master boot record anyway.
> 
> 
> Cool, I guessed right (eventually).
> 
>> If you want to install FreeBSD on the first drive, you have to make room
>> for it.
> 
> 
> Need some enlightenment here.

He's just saying you need to make room if you already have another OS 
where you want to install FreeBSD.  In your case, do you have a 150MB 
partition on your first disk with Win98 installed there, or is the full 
4GB disk devoted to Win98, of which 150MB are currently used?  Sounds 
like the latter, in which case you might want to shrink the Win 
partition, though FreeBSD and all the apps you might want can almost 
certainly live quite happily in 10GB.  I haven't used parted.  I have 
used BootItNG, which has a free 30-day trial, and which I find to be 
exceptionally easy to use and well documented.  Despite the name, it 
does resize and move Win partitions as well as function as a bootloader. 
  I have used it predominantly for the former, and to make compressed 
images of my Win installation for backups.  I prefer GAG for the 
bootloader function.  It's free, and, like BootItNG, is very easy to use.

>> I think the standard for Windows is to take the entire disk
> 
> 
> The entire partition afaik. Therefore right now in fbsd terms I have
> 
> ads0 - 4 gb
> ads1 - 4 gb
> ads2 - 6 gb

Actually, you have ad0 4GB, ad1 4GB and ad2 6GB.  "ad" is an IDE drive 
in FreeBSD.  "s" is "slice," close to synonymous with a Win "partition." 
  If my assumption is correct that the entire first drive is devoted to 
Windows, then both ad0 (the drive) and ad0s1 (first and only slice on 
the first drive) are around 4GB.

> and to go right into the fbsd install would have to give all of ads0 to 
> windows, which I don't want to do.
> 
> Now, I could reformat the first ide with windows' fdisk... say I did 
> this and created two partitions of .5 & 3.5 gb respectively. They'd be 
> windows partitions so that wouldn't necessarily work, or would it? Doing 
> this I'd have to reinstall windows after.
> 
> In that case, would fbsd see
> 
> ads0 - .5 gb
> ads1 - 3.5 gb
> ads2 - 4 gb
> ads3 - 6 gb

It would see ad0s1 (the first slice on drive ad0) as .5GB, ad0s2 as 
3.5GB, ad1 as 4GB and ad2 as 6GB.  If you do shrink your Win 
installation, you might give it around 1GB, just in order to be quite 
sure that you wouldn't have to play around with resizing partitions more 
than once, but it's your call.

Jud