Hello all,

Recently I have become interested in partitioning the hard drive of my old Toshiba Satellite L455D-S5976 laptop, so that I could learn the FreeBSD Unix-like environment. Though I plan to use FreeBSD, I would like to keep my old Windows 7 operating system around. Now I have downloaded onto a USB stick a live boot Gparted partitioning tool using Unetbootin. I am stuck at what to exactly to partition. It seems to me that primary partitioning Tl105866W0A by 100 Gigabytes for FreeBSD would be the correct way to partition without corrupting Windows 7. Would I be correct by chance? I have backed up any important information from the old OS and have made recovery disks of Windows 7 just in case. Lastly I wanted to say that the three partitions all have a blue square to the left of ntfs, which leads me to believe that they are all tied together which makes me worry if partitioning the Tl105866W0A will corrupt Windows 7.
When in Gparted I have listed the three partitions below.

The first one is partition /dev/sda1 File System ntfs Label System Size 1.46 GiB used 179.86 MiB Used 1.29 Unused GiB Flags boot, diag

The second one is partition /dev/sda2 File System ntfs Label Tl105866W0A Size 223.33 GiB Used 79.96 GiB Unused 143.37 GiB Flags none listed

The third one is partition /dev/sda3 File System ntfs Label HDDRECOVERY Size 8.09 GiB Used 7.53 GiB Unused 568.66 MiB Flags hidden

Thanks for taking the time to read this and I appreciate any and all feedback.

I've never used FreeBSD but I believe you will be better off using the windows Disk Management tool to shrink your largest windows partition to make unallocated space on which to install FreeBSD. After doing this, I would suggest you run chkdsk upon rebooting windows before beginning the install of FreeBSD.

To shrink a MS Windows partition use the MS Windows tools. Once you have some free space on the drive then is the time to create your BSD partition. When you install BSD it will sub divide that partition with its own tools, then you can install BSD.

I believe the BSD boot loader will offer both O/S at boot time. I haven't used MS Windows since Vista, so read the instructions for installing FreeBSD carefully before hand.

There is a very good forum for FreeBSD, but be careful, they are sticklers for protocol.
https://forums.freebsd.org/
https://forums.freebsd.org/forums/4/

P.S. Download an up to date version, you may not get help with your out dated version.

Edit: Also take a look on here, http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/*bsd-17/

Maxwack : I join our members above in recommending you shrink the current main Windows partition (sda2) with the Windows Disk Management tool (right click on My Computer and choose Manage and then the Disk Management snap-in). Shrink it to whatever you feel comfortable with - you have a lot of unused space (I suggest leaving 100GB for the Win7 system, although the Windows tool may limit the amount of shrinkage you can apply). Although tools like GParted will allow you to operate on NTFS partitions, I've found it more reliable to use Windows' own tools to do this.

I do not recommend you touch either sda1 or sda3 - these are System partitions used by Windows for recovery, among other things. By leaving them as they are, you will be able to return the computer to its factory settings at any time.

You can then install BSD to the unpartitioned space using whatever method the installer offers (I am unfamiliar with BSD).

Cheers :-)

Thank you Yancek, Fatmac, and Rickkkk for all of the help!