Paritioning scheme on MBR disk doubts

[David Christensen]

On 8/26/21 11:32 AM, Javier wrote:

> And, so, I want to be sure what is allowed given the questions I made.
> If I'm correct in my assumption with the 3rd case shown, or totally
> wrong.


I tried multi-boot back in the day.  It was an unreliable PITA.  The 
various Linux mailing lists still have posts and replies by people with 
this form of self-harm:

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_harm


So, I installed a second HDD, installed a second OS on it, and selected 
the boot device via HDD jumpers and/or Setup.


When I got tired of the hardware inconvenience and wanted more than two 
OS choices, I installed drive racks in my desktop tower chassis, bought 
extra drives, and dedicate one drive to each OS instance.  (This was the 
IDE era.)


As time progressed, I was able to standardize on 2.5" SATA drives, 2.5" 
SATA chassis racks, and laptops with externally-accessible 2.5" SATA 
drive bays.


The final improvement was virtualization.


Now I can choose my hardware, choose my base OS, and run multiple OS's 
at the same time.  :-)


The next challenge will come when I want NVMe drives everywhere.


> I could do all automatic, but I'm those that prefer to do manually
> knowing what I'm doing. Or at least, what is happening in the
> background.


KISS.  Use the FreeBSD installer and choose the simplest options.  Use a 
camera for screen captures and type up good notes in a second computer. 
  Consider it an experiment that you will repeat several times over the 
next year as you learn.


Keep your data on a separate device (better yet, RAID).


Get good at backup/ restore, archiving, and imaging.


David