FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE and Windows XP on one system

[Marc van Woerkom]

Hello,

I am trying to run both FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE and Windows 
XP on one system and had no success yet.

The system is a rather old PIII-400 with one 4 GB IDE hard 
disk (recognized by the BIOS) as master and one 40 GB IDE 
hard (where I have to disable the BIOS recognition) as 
slave hard disk.

So far I managed to run Windows XP on that box, when I put 
a little start partition on the master drive and the XP 
installation on the slave drive. 
Windows XP was able to work with the 40 GB disk, while the 
BIOS hangs while autodetecting it.

Then I tried to install FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE in another 
partition of the 40 GB disk. 

Sysinstall complained about the geometry of the 40 GB 
disk, saying that the values it read were impossible and 
it would continue with something more appropriate.
Except for that bit the installation went as usual.

However booting the system was not successful.
The boot manager installed by sysinstall was neither able 
to boot Windows XP nor the FreeBSD installation.

Is it possible that the standard FreeBSD boot manager 
doesn't work with Windows XP?

Yesterday I tried to just install FreeBSD on that system, 
and maybe after that doing a new installation of Windows 
XP.
But even this didn't work.

So I now think that FreeBSD has big trouble with my disks.
Perhaps the on board controller of the PIII-400 board is 
too  old for 40 GB IDE drives?

It is a bit frustrating that I managed to get both Windows 
XP and some older SuSE linux running on that system and 
not old faithful FreeBSD. :(

I also bought the complete FreeBSD recently, it has really 
progressed from my old Walnut creek edition, but it 
doesn't cover systems running both FreeBSD and any Windows 
>= Windows 2000.

Any idea what is going on?
Help would be very welcome!

Regards,
Marc