Mucking with other drive

[Mike Jeays]

On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 11:03, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> > 
> > 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?
> 
> Well, that is true.   That is what I said - except for writing the MBR,
> which is mucking with that other drive, but not installing other stuff
> over the top of things.   I don't know about those percentages.  I have 
> never run in to that situation and had it fail.  Make sure you copy all 
> impossible to replace files before doing anything like that anyway.
> So, where does Carrie live?   Can I drive there?
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Yup.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Sure, if you have that opportunity.    But, I'd rather reboot and
> have use of a decently fast recent machine than consign myself to
> an old slow clunker for one or the other systems.
> 
> > 
> > Dual-boot systems never work anyway.  The operator always ends up
> > spending 99% of their time in one operating system.
> 
> Well, if you get used to FreeBSD, probably you will stick with
> that most of the time to get any work done.   But, I find on 
> this machine, I use both of the OSen pretty much every day.
> That is mostly because I have to interact with people who need
> things in MS.
> But, dual boot does work and work quite well, actually.    
> 
> ////jerry
> 
> > 
> > Ted
> > 
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"

I agree that dual boot works fine, and is quite safe with moderate
care.  An alternative is hard disk caddies, which make it easy to have
different operating systems on different disks, with no possibility
whatsoever of one damaging the other.  Of course, there is an increased
risk that you may drop one of them...