Hi there!

I'm planing to install FreeBSD 6.0 on my system as a third OS. Up 'til now my main OS is Linux and as a second WinXP. I read about installing FeeBSD on there website, but I'm having trouble understanding the way, BSD calls/manages its partitions. So maybe some of you can help me out?

On my system I'd like to create some free space on my second hd. It would look like this (linux naming)
sdb1 - linux swap
sdb2 - ext3
sdb3 - FreeBSD? (would it be da1s3?)
sdb5 - ntfs
sdb6 - ntfs
sdb7 - fat32

So, da1s3 would contain the BSD partitions with /, /var, etc. like da1s3a, b...?
Do I have to understand a slice as some kind of extended partition where the mounted BSD partitions are logical drives? If this would be the case, would I run into problems if there already is an extended partition on this HD?
Any help apreciated!
Thanks!

Yup! Although, depending on what kind of disk it is (or more correctly, where on the system it's located), FreeBSD may assign a different name to it. For example, I have a serial ATA drive: it shows up as da4 even though it's the only hard disk in there. Also, certain letters have special meanings. "a" indicates the root partition, "b" is for a swap partition, and "c" indicates the whole slice (in raw terms, don't screw with this one!). "d" used to represent the entire disk (also in raw terms) but doesn't anymore. So / will be da1s3a, SWAP will be da1s3b, and anything you add after that will be da1s3d, da1s3e, etc.

Kinda. FreeBSD will handle this information by itself, so the BIOS doesn't get involved in determining the partitions on a BSD slice. This is why many more traditional partition editors (especially Microsoft ones) don't fully recognize BSD slices for what they really are, at least not in terms of the partitions they contain. To the outside world, a BSD slice looks just like any other ordinary partition.

No, you should not, because the BIOS does not consider it as an extended partition. But of course, always backup your important data before messing with partition tables.

Thank you very much!!! That's exactly the info I needed!

Write down on paper the information given by fdisk on Linux regarding the C/H/S numbers to enforce them at the BSD sysinstall if necessary, and at least backup the MBR (contains the partition table) in case something goes wrong: "dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/floppy/mbr bs=512 count=1"

FreeBSD may change your partition layout if it uses another setup of C/H/S numbers, so try to see whether sysinstall agrees with what fdisk gave you. If not, then introduce them yourself. Then if you like you may reboot to linux again to see how the partition table was setup and go back to the installer knowing that it won't write data past the partition you want for it