FreeBSD-8 Dual Booting With Pre-Installed Windows 7?

[S Roberts]

Hello Warren,
      Great to hear from you..,

On Mon, 5 Apr 2010 09:10:47 -0600 (MDT)
Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 5 Apr 2010, S Roberts wrote:
> > Hello Masoom,
> >
> >>>> I have been using EasyBCD on Win7 + FBSD8 for some 6+ months now
> >>>
> >>> That's great to hear.., Can you confirm that you started off with
> >>> a pre-installed windows 7 machine / single disk and then **added**
> >>> FreeBSD, please?
> 
> EasyBCD worked for me on a preinstalled Vista machine, adding FreeBSD
> 8. And of course Vista is just Win7 alpha.
> 

Understood - only realized this over the past 24 hours.,

> >> Win7 is installed on part1, part2 is data drive so that bot OSes
> >> can read/write do not want to use fusefs
> >>
> >> first install Win7, then FreeBSD, then boot in Win7 and use
> >> EasyBCD to add FreeBSD as another entry
> >> remember to advise FreeBSD to not touch MBR.
> >>
> >
> > Understood. So for your installation of FreeBSD, selecting "None
> > Leave Master Boot Record untouched" actually did work - and you did
> > **NOT** find that sysinstall still went ahead and messed with the
> > mbr?
> 
> No problem for me.
> 
> > Sorry for the questions, but I recall a recent thread where a few
> > people confirmed that this option does not behave as expected,
> > and folks ended up with broken windows mbrs.
> 
> There's a relatively rare bug in sysinstall, but even if there
> wasn't, you should still back up the existing MBR and the whole
> Windows partition before you add another OS.
> 
> For backup, you can use the FreeBSD livefs and dd, but clonezilla or 
> partimage are faster.  Clonezilla automatically saves a separate copy
> of the MBR, AFAIR.
> 

That's excellent information. I was unsure of the status of
sysinstall's integrity as far as the efficacy of these option
selections.

Will have a go shortly.

Regards,

S Roberts

> http://www.clonezilla.org/
> http://sysresccd.org/Main_Page
> 
> -Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA
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