how to set up a dual boot system

[Marty Landman]

At 06:08 PM 2/13/2005, Roland Smith wrote:
>On Sun, Feb 13, 2005 at 05:40:13PM -0500, Marty Landman wrote:
> > I have a box with 3 ide's
> >
> > primary master - 4 gb, win 98 currently installed @ 150 mb in size
> >
> > primary slave - 4 gb, empty
> >
> > secondary slave - 6 gb, empty


>You can install FreeBSD on any harddisk. If you want dual-boot, you'll
>need to install a boot manager.

Ok, I understand how to do that much but wasn't sure it could work that way.

>Usually it's best to install Windows first, because it will overwrite
>the master boot record anyway.

Cool, I guessed right (eventually).

>If you want to install FreeBSD on the first drive, you have to make room
>for it.

Need some enlightenment here.

>I think the standard for Windows is to take the entire disk

The entire partition afaik. Therefore right now in fbsd terms I have

ads0 - 4 gb
ads1 - 4 gb
ads2 - 6 gb

and to go right into the fbsd install would have to give all of ads0 to 
windows, which I don't want to do.

Now, I could reformat the first ide with windows' fdisk... say I did this 
and created two partitions of .5 & 3.5 gb respectively. They'd be windows 
partitions so that wouldn't necessarily work, or would it? Doing this I'd 
have to reinstall windows after.

In that case, would fbsd see

ads0 - .5 gb
ads1 - 3.5 gb
ads2 - 4 gb
ads3 - 6 gb

>so you'd have to shrink the windows partition or repartition the disk and 
>reinstall windows on a
>new partition. There are free tools like parted available to resize FAT 
>partitions.

Roland, are you saying that if I were to install fbsd now on

ads1 - 4 gb
ads2 - 6 gb

then I could later on install parted and use it to shrink ads0 and allocate 
the overage to fbsd? If so, that sounds like my best option.

Am I getting this right?

Thanks,

Marty


Marty Landman, Face 2 Interface Inc. 845-679-9387
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