Ok I'm currently in the process of downloading FreeBSD 6. Now I had a question about mount points:

Here's my partition setup: http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y13...heFall/hda.png

/hda1 is my Fedora Partition
The little free space after it is going to be the FreeBSD swap slice
Extended partition:
/hda5 is my home partition. I use it as a universal home folder for each distro I install.
/hda6 and /hda7 are Partitions with Data on them, I'll figure out a way to expand my home folder to take up all that space and contain that data on it.
/hda8 is has Debian on it, actually I never use it at the moment so it'll probably have to go.
/hda9 is the swap partition I use for any Linux distro I install on the system.
And finally the last partition ist where FreeBSD is going.

My question is: Can I set the /home mount point to /hda5 during installation, though it's on an Extended partition? Somewhere I read (or I think I read) that you can only allocate mount points on the whole extended partition. I just want to mount my BSD home folder on hda5. What can I do for that? Or is it impossible because /hda5 is ext3? Please help me out.

Will this whole thing go easily or am I better off backing up my stuff, wiping my hard drive and setting up the partitions from scratch?

Thanks a lot!

-A

While you can mount ext3, they mount as ext2 and you will have various problems (especially if you intend to write to it).

It is much better to have /home on a single partition and you can mount /home/linux-home/ or whatever... beneath it. I would probably mount it read only just to keep it from being corrupted. Although I tend to be more conservative about things like that than most people.

So is there any way how to be able to write to an ext3 partition without risking corrupting it (e.g. adding kernel support or something..)?

Thanks a lot!

-A

Actually, to my knowledge, writing to it at all isn't even possible. I think there was experimental write support for a while (or maybe I imagined it) but it never worked well. It is likely support will come in the future but it's not something I would wait on.

For the time being, plan on read only access to the data. If you need to have a partition to share data between systems make sure it's one that both can read and write (and not FAT -- windows -- based because you want to keep permissions and such).

hi there- I have a similar question, so i thought I would add to this thread -
I currently have Ubuntu (root) installed on /dev/hda1 (primary)
/dev/hda2 is the extended partition containing:
Slamd64 (root) on /dev/hda5 (logical)
swap on /dev/hda6
/home (shared) on /dev/hda7

I was reading the handbook yesterday, and from what I can gather, FreeBSD's root has to be on a primary partition, (/dev/hda1) where as I was hoping to put it over slamd64 on /dev/hda5.
Also does FreeBSD have to use XFS? or can it use another filesystem, such as reiser or ext3?

If I am right, and what I am reading on here is right, then I will need to re-format the entire disk, create the partitions a bit more equally, then have 2 home partitions, one on reiserFS and the other on XFS, along with a new install of Ubuntu on /dev/hda5 and /dev/hda1 gets XFS with FreeBSD... or can it be done the other way around and can i make linux use XFS?
It would be nice to have the two OS's talking to each other with full read/write.

Thanks

A slightly confused linux-only-up-to-now user.

FreeBSD uses UFS not XFS. Yes, you will need to repartition... FreeBSD won't boot from an extended (logical) partition.

At the very least you need the / (root) partition to be ufs. All the others should be something which could reliably be mounted r/w and be checked at boot. Most usually this is also ufs (for many reasons... but mostly simplicity). Note: linux will read ufs filesystems without too many problems.

FreeBSD does not have reiserfs or ext3... I won't get into a filesystem flame-war here, but they see little need for these formats. With soft-updates the need for a journaling filesystem just does not exist.
http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/index.html

That link provides some other information. But in short, the lack of need/desire for these filesystems means there is not much call for full support in the base system. I would recommend using either ufs (preferred) or ext2 to share data between the two systems.