Installing Windows *after* FreeBSD

Christian Baer cb at icerats.de
Tue Nov 4 21:01:49 UTC 2014


Good evening, everyone!

A few days ago I bought myself a new computer - at long last! :-) I have been 
working with FreeBSD for quite a while now, but only ever on servers, never on 
a desktop-computer or a workstation. This time I took special care to make 
sure FreeBSD would run on all the hardware. Only catch: The case has no room 
for a FreeBSD badge. :-)

I guess I was a little over-enthusiastic and installed FreeBSD right away. As 
you can see, I managed to get it running, including X, nvdidia-driver and 
sound. ;-)

At times, I still like gaming and although I do not spend most of my computer 
time doing that, I did leave some room on my SSD for Windows. To be exact, I 
created three primary partitions (MBR style, Win7 is a pain with UEFI), one 
100MB, one ~120GB (these two are for Windows) and one ~118GB for FreeBSD.

My problem is that should I install Windows now, FreeBSD won't boot anymore, 
because Windows will replace the boot loader. If there is any documentation 
about using FreeBSD and Windows on one machine, it usually assumes that 
Windows was installed first.

Does anybody know of some documentation or howto to install these two OSs the 
other way around? As you can imagine, I don't really fancy the idea of 
starting from scratch here.

Thanks for any suggestions!

Best regards,
Chris


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