Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2013 20:44:45 -0700 From: Ben Cottrell <tamino@wolfhut.org> To: <leeoliveshackelford@surewest.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Installing 9.1 without re-partitioning hard drive Message-ID: <4B56BC62-B8BC-4EB4-B356-988D5EC7C610@wolfhut.org> In-Reply-To: <20130314193404.DEM52311@ms5.mc.surewest.net> References: <20130314193404.DEM52311@ms5.mc.surewest.net>
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Lee, Are you using DOS-style or GPT partitions? I'm assuming DOS-style, and the rest of this email is only correct if that's the case, so correct me if I'm wrong. There's actually two partition tables at work here -- the "big" one, that lives at the start of the physical disk and divides up the FreeBSD from the Windows. Inside the FreeBSD "slice" (slice, partition, same thing, but just to be clear, call it a slice) there's going to be *another* partition table, to divide up the FreeBSD partitions amongst themselves. At a bare minimum you're going to have two partitions (which are really sub-partitions at this point), root and swap. Maybe even more. So it seems to me like, if you can get to the point where the FreeBSD installer recognizes the slice you've set aside for it, as its own, then you can let it rewrite the partition table *inside that slice* as much as it wants to. OK? Make sense? You just don't want it to touch the *outer* one. I honestly don't know enough about how the boot blocks work to know if that's going to work, in the end. You might still end up having to say yes to let it install FreeBSD boot blocks -- I don't know. But it seems to me like a prerequisite, in any case, is going to be to set the FreeBSD partition to partition type 165, so that the installer will recognize it as a FreeBSD slice. Is it already partition type 165? If not, can you make it type 165 and see if that changes anything? ~Ben
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