Hello all,

I have an unused secondary drive in my Windows XP box and would like to install FreeBSD on it to test interaction with my Slackware box. I've installed FreeBSD on single-boot computers and was wondering if there is anything I should be careful of when installing a dual-boot system, like where to install the bootloader, etc.

Thanks,
Kent

Just make sure you back up XP (just in case). Make sure you don't format/install to hda, use manual partitioning/config to use hdb. If you don't plan to keep install use a boot floppy or install bootloader to hdb. After your done you can use XP recovery console to reinstall windows bootloader if something gets overwritten.

I have a BSD, Win XP, CentOS box with grub as the boot loader. Another BSD, Win XP box with BSD loader doing the booting. It'll work fine either way. Win XP has to be on a primary partition, the 1st partition on the drive as far as I know. BSD or Linux will play nicely on another partition. The BSD installer says that BSD has to be on a primary partition. Also I messed one install up and the XP recover console would not help it with fixboot or fixmbr. Somehow I messed up ntldr and XP would not correct it. I finally did a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1M and started over. So back up your stuff just like allways before trying to move a partition or dual boot a machine.

Thank you for the replies!

I'm actually installing FreeBSD on a separate drive so there won't be any problems with Windows partitions.

Kent

If you do over write any MBRs you can always use the WIn XP disk as a boot CD and go to the recovery console. I think the command is C:\>fixmbr. In DOS it was FDISK /mbr.

I ended up using GAG as the bootloader. One good thing about GAG is that it can be booted from a floppy with the OS and drive information on it. I didn't even touch the Windows mbr.

Kent

How did you go about using this ?

Download GAG here http://gag.sourceforge.net/

Install GAG to a floppy, reboot from the floppy and add the drive numbers and systems to choose from, in my case Windows XP on the first hard drive and FreeBSD on the second hard drive.

GAG can be installed on a hard drive but I chose to use the floppy since it might cause some confusion with my kids who use Win XP.

Kent

Thanks for that.

Unfortunatley, it doesn't see my SATA Drive on which the BSD is installed on


D'Oh !

It only shows the first installed drive. I had to tell it to look at drive B, then it saw that FreeBSD was on that drive.

Kent

Hmm, so it doesn't actually list B ? Because it only listed one drive A which was my XPSP2 Dirve. :S

My only suggestion is to install XP first becuase it likes to eat the MBR and leave only itself, it is evil like that