Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1999 03:30:35 -0500 From: Bob Johnson <bobj@atlantic.net> To: wwoods@cybcon.com Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Dual Win98 and FreeBSD system Message-ID: <3.0.6.32.19991122033035.00a26cd0@rio.atlantic.net>
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On Sun, 21 Nov 1999 17:17:42 -0800 (PST) William Woods <wwoods@cybcon.com> asked: > I have a 10 gig hard drive and am planning on dual booting Win98 and > FreeBSD. I > am planning on soplitting it right down the middle, 5gig each, but what > I am > wondering is I remember reading something about FreeBSD needing to be in > the > forst 1024 megs or soemthing like that. Is this true? Discussing this gets confusing because what the MS-DOS/Windows world calls a "partition", the BSD world calls a "slice", and the BSD world uses "partition" to mean something roughly equivalent to an MS-DOS logical partition. AFAIK, the problem is that the PC BIOS only knows how to boot from "partitions" (the MS-DOS term) that are in the first 1024 cylinders (not megabytes). So the boot portion of FreeBSD needs to be in the first 1024 cylinders of your drive. Since large drives tend to have large cylinders, this is often not a problem. THE FIRST THING TO DO is find out how many cylinders your system BIOS thinks the hard drive has. That information will be critical to figuring out how to do your installation. Next, try reading http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/multi-os/index.html which will help, although some of the information is out of date. Note that Windows 95 (at least the earlier versions) has to be on the FIRST partition of the disk. That may not be true in recent versions. And, experience has shown that, if possible, you want all of your Windows stuff in one partition (C:); it makes life much simpler. The root BSD partition does not need to be very large; you can hang other partitions from it by using appropriate mount points during the setup, and/or links after installation. Figuring out the details of how you want to arrange your various slices and partitions is a bit challenging if you haven't used FreeBSD before, because you don't know how big things need to be, but the install program gives you some suggestions if you need it to. Use just one Windows "partition" and one FreeBSD "slice" if that's possible, it will keep things simple. With all of this in mind, your general strategy should probably be something like: (assume the total size of your drive is smaller than 2048 cylinders, as viewed by your system BIOS) 1) Set up a Windows partition that takes up half your drive, and is smaller than 1024 cylinders by at least 35 MB or so. Install Windows on this partition. 2) Start the FreeBSD installation. 3) Set up a FreeBSD slice that fits in the remainder of the first 1024 cylinders. Set up another FreeBSD slice on the rest of the drive. 4) In the first FreeBSD slice, create a FreeBSD partition and mount it as / (root). FreeBSD will boot from this. 5) Create the remainder of your FreeBSD partitions in the other slice and finish the installation. 6) After installation, if the root partition isn't big enough, learn how to set up links to move stuff from the root partition to other, bigger, partitions. Adjust this procedure depending on how many cylinders are on the drive. For example, if the first few gigabytes of FreeBSD will fit below cyl 1024, you might want to put several partitions there instead of just one. I'm assuming that you don't need a swap partition below cyl 1024 to boot FreeBSD. I could be wrong... -- Bob +-------------------------------------------------------- | Bob Johnson | bobj@cisi.com +-------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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