I have a WinXP computer with two internal hard drives that are partitioned. I would like to setup a dualbooting system. I first attempted to install PC-BSD 8.0 from a DVD onto an external 640 GB USB hard drive. Everything looked it was going to work (including the boot loader program) until after the installation. PC-BSD took out the NTFS of the hard drive (with over 500 GB of Window files). And the bootloader never loaded on startup. It took two days to get everything back. The files created on this external hard drive could not be read by another linux operating system (Slax 6.1.1).

I would like to load PC-BSD on one of my empty partitions (from my second hard drive). The manual for PC-BSD states PC-BSD has to be installed on a primary drive and not a logical drive. If you attempt a logical drive installation, PC-BSD will wipe out the entire hard drive on installation. Would it help if I format a logical partition to the linux file system and then attempt to install PC-BSD to it? I can use Slax 6.1.1 from a CD to format the logical partition.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Janus Ruhk

I have tried PCBSD V7 out of interest only (Not an expert)-had no trouble installing it.
If you reserve some free space on your disc to target, you should be able to create a primary partition within the PCBSD installation procedure to install. It requires a primary partition (As does Windows$), and it's own FS - however you can have other OSs on the same hard drive. I found it odd that linux-fs and unix-ufs, do not talk to each other.