Three questions...

Giorgos Keramidas keramida at ceid.upatras.gr
Sun Jul 17 02:46:05 GMT 2005


On 2005-07-15 13:27, George Ruch <george.ruch at 3lefties.com> wrote:
> I'm working on a 5.4-REL test installation on my main desktop machine.
> Hardware specifics:
>
> 	MSI MS-6378 MB
> 	AMD Athalon 1800 @ 1536
> 	256 MB memory
> 	2 x Maxtor 30 GB drives
> 	Zip 100 ATA
> 	DVD-RW
>
> This will be a learning installation.  I have some past experience with
> OS/2 Warp 3 and Redhat 5.1 (no, you don't get to guess my age)

HEH! :-)

> Q1:  I have two drives, laid out as follows:
> Drive 1
> /ad0a	  WinXP, NTFS, 16.06GB, primary
> /ad0e     data, NTFS, 12.58GB, extended
>
> Drive 2
> /ad1a     currently empty, 14.36GB, primary
>           (installation target)
> /ad1e     /ad0 backup, NTFS, 14.27GB, extended
>
> I'd like to use XP's NTLDR to manage the dual boot process.  I've seen
> the following trick for Linux ( www.redhat.com/advice/tips/dualboot.html):
>
> - Boot into Linux, copy the first sector of the boot partition as follows:
> 	dd if=/dev/hdb of=/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1
> - Move bootsect.lnx to WinXP root (C:\), and add the following line to
> boot.ini:
> 	C:\bootsect.lnx="Linux"
>
> Does this approach work with FreeBSD?  Logic says it should, given the
> similarities, but when has logic applied consistently to computers?

Yes, of course.  You just have to make sure that the FreeBSD installation
process installs the FreeBSD boot manager on the MBR of the second drive.

Then, copy over the MBR of the second drive to Windows' primary partition,
i.e. by saving it to a file and using a floppy or something (I haven't used
NTFS for read-write mounts, so I'm not sure you can just mount the first
NTFS partition), and add a line like the suggested one to C:\BOOT.INI.

> Q2: Failing that, does anyone out there have any experience with
> PowerQuest's (now Symantec) BootMagic boot manager (p/o Partition Magic
> 8.0) and FreeBSD?  The documentation indicated that it will recognize
> Linux partitions, but says nothing about FreeBSD.

Not sure.

> Q3: Partitioning
>   Yes, I know you've seen several million questions on partitioning
> schemes.  I've read up on it, and I'd like to get some feedback on this
> plan.  All slices would be p/o ad1a, which has approx. 14,704MB free.
>
> 	/		128M
> 	/usr	8192M
> 	/home	3312M
> 	/var	1024M
> 	/tmp	1024M
> 	swap	1024M  (4 x physical)

That seems ok.  I'd probably give 3-4 GB to /usr and all the rest to /home,
since I usually prefer keeping most of my data under /home and leave the
root partition, /var and /usr for the "system".

If you can spare the disk space, it may also be a good idea to avoid
creating a special /tmp partition altogether, create a large swap partition
and then use a swap-backed tmpmfs partition (see tmpmfs in rc.conf(5) for
the details).

- Giorgos



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