Mucking with other drive

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Jerry,

Well, of course it's going to "muck with the other drive" what
do you think writing the MBR does?  Do you want to risk the MS system
not booting?  95% of the time it will work OK but what if her system
is in that 5% of the time that it doesen't?  You going to go
over to her house and fix it?  What if she's got some nutty drive
program on there like diskmanager that neither of you know about that
is already on the mbr?

Carrie,

PC bioses only let you boot off of drive C.  If you install this
other drive as drive D then during the installation FreeBSD is going
to have to write a boot loader onto C so that when the PC boots
it will load the boot loader, which will then load the FreeBSD system
off drive D.

You need to leave well enough alone.  You can pick up older PC's for a
song
these days.  If you have critical data on your Dell then don't
screw with it.  Find some other PC that someone's going to throw away
and load FreeBSD on that.  You don't even need a monitor for it, you
can telnet/ssh into it from your Dell system easily.

Dual-boot systems never work anyway.  The operator always ends up
spending 99% of their time in one operating system.

Ted

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Jerry
> McAllister
> Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2005 6:24 AM
> To: CARRIE WUERFEL
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: Mucking with other drive
>
>
> >
> > I am currently stuck running Windows Me on a Dell Desktop
> Pentium 3 1ghrtz with 512mb ram.  I recently dusted off a old
> hard drive that contains a whole 2 gigs of hard drive space.
> I have installed the hard disk drive and am wanting to install
> "FreeBsd" on it.  Before I go about mucking things up, I just
> wanted to make sure that when I go to install FreeBsd it will
> not mess up the existing hard drive.  I have business and
> payroll progs on it.  I am also wondering if when installing
> there is an actual question asked by the installation prog for
> destination.  Sorry to be asking a stupid question, and I
> swear I read through your installation info until my eyes
> dried out and couldn't find the answers, so that is why I am
> bothering you.  I did try to find the answer first.  Anyways
> any help would be cool as I would really like to start
> relearning another operating system.
>
> If you do the install on the new old drive, it will not muck with
> the MS drive other than to write the MBR to make it know how to
> boot the FreeBSd drive.
>
> Now, of course, you could squeeze the MS junk down and install FreeBSD
> in a separate slice on the same drive as the MS junk.   But, that is
> a different story.
>
> ////jerry
>
> >
> > Andy
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