Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 18:03:38 -0400 (EDT) From: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@clunix.cl.msu.edu> To: flo@bsdforen.de (Florian Schmidt) Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Dual boot with windows xp and freebsd Message-ID: <200304302203.h3UM3cOf010066@clunix.cl.msu.edu> In-Reply-To: <200304302333.15856.flo@bsdforen.de> from "Florian Schmidt" at Apr 30, 2003 11:33:15 PM
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> > On Wednesday 30 April 2003 23:28, 1@bendcable.com wrote: > > I would like to setup a partition on my Toshiba laptop to put FreeBSD > > on. I currently have windows xp that I would like to keep. How can I > > dual boot with FreeBSD without loosing windows xp? > Actually, installing the FreeBSD BootMgr when prompted during Installation > should do the trick. Also, be careful about keeping partition and slice straight. What is called slice in the BSD world is called partition in the MS world. Then, in the BSD world, slices can be further divided in to partitions. So you want to install FreeBSD in a separate slice on the disk. Within that slice you will probably want partitions for root, swap, /tmp, /usr, maybe /var and /home or some such. Or you might want to put some of these beyond root on a second disk - depending on where you have space. If you do not have a slice (MS partition) already made to hold the FreeBSD install and the XP slice uses up all of the current disk space (minus what the hardware vendor leaves for diagnostics, etc), you will need to use a utililty to squeeze the MS-XP slice down to make room for it. I have successfully used Partition Magic. There are others. Partition Magic is not free, but it is not expensive and is available in stores such as Best Buy and online retailers. It has the advantage of being able to handle NTFS type disk systems that like to come with XP and Win2K which some of the others and especially freeware ones do not know how to handle yet. Note that the boot manager (MBR) mentioned above replaces any boot manager that MS-XP put there and that is good. It will know how to boot either the XP slice (partition in MS words) and the FreeBSD slice as long as those slices are marked as bootable and have a boot block in the right place. The Xp slice already has one and the FreeBSD installer will put one in the FreeBSD slice for you. The FreeBSD standard boot manager will then offer you a selection at boot time of which slice to boot from. Unfortunately, so far it doesn't have an internal name for XP so it identifies it as ???. But, it still works fine. Also, keep track of the terminology about boot records. Every bootable slice has to have a boot block. The boot device (disk - determined by the BIOS) also has to have a boot manager if there are more than one bootable slices to select from. Unfortunarely the terms sound a little similar since they all have the word 'boot' in them and people tend to be rather sloppy and don't distinguish between them well in talking or writing about them. Good luck, ////jerry > > Greetings > Flo > -- > http://www.bsdforen.de > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" > >
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