Questions on first-time installation

[Jerry McAllister]

On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 08:42:04AM +0000, Jan Grant wrote:

> On Tue, 7 Nov 2006, Bob Schwartz wrote:
> 
> > ... at least as it is desribed in the DELL
> > docs and bios...
> 
> Be really careful. The windows boot loader should be able to boot a 
> freebsd install for you. 

I have never had a Windows MBR work to boot FreeBSD.   On the other
hand I have never had a FreeBSD MBR fail to boot any MS-Win system.

So, I wonder at your comment here.

>   Dell usually ship their machines with a small 
> partition at the front of the drive (at least, they did last time I 
> received one). That partition is at an odd offset and didn't agree with 
> the FBSD partition editor: I found this out the hard way. Things may 
> have changed since then; I usually nuke the dell partition anyway.

I have never had to correct any partition/slice alignment when using
the standard FreeBSD install.  I ignore that Diagnostic slice that
Dell puts on - just leave it there as slice 1, leave MS there as
slice 2 and put FreeBSD on slice 3 - or sometimes I put a FAT32 on
as slice 3 to use for communication if the MS is NTFS, and then put
FreeBSD on slice 4.   There has never been any problem with any
alignment or offset.   I shrink the MS-Win slice(primary partition)
down with Partition Magic and use that to define the 1 (or 2) extra
primary partition(s) (2 if I add that fst32) and then use the 
standard FreeBSD fdisk/bsdlabel/newfs either directly or through
sysinstall to define the slices, mark the FreeBSD slice bootable,
divide the FreeBSD slice in to partitions and build filesystems on
the FreeBSD partitions.  If I make the fat32 slice, I leave that 
alone because nothing else needs to be done to read/write it in
MS-DOS mode.

////jerry

> 
> jan
> 
> PS. I should say that my bad experience with the partition editor is a 
> few years old; I've not tried again recently with new Dell kit.

I have been doing this the way I describe since 1998 with no problem.
/jrm

> 
> -- 
> jan grant, ISYS, University of Bristol. http://www.bris.ac.uk/
> Tel +44 (0)117 3317661   http://ioctl.org/jan/
> Axioms speak louder than words.
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