Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 10:35:06 -0500 From: Jerry McAllister <jerrymc@msu.edu> To: Jan Grant <jan.grant@bristol.ac.uk> Cc: Bob Schwartz <bob@bschwartz.com>, 'Bill Moran' <wmoran@collaborativefusion.com>, FreeBSD-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Questions on first-time installation Message-ID: <20061110153506.GB86927@gizmo.acns.msu.edu> In-Reply-To: <20061108083717.V72340@tribble.ilrt.bris.ac.uk> References: <001a01c70282$13eb9a00$0500a8c0@c1> <20061108083717.V72340@tribble.ilrt.bris.ac.uk>
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On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 08:42:04AM +0000, Jan Grant wrote: > On Tue, 7 Nov 2006, Bob Schwartz wrote: > > > ... at least as it is desribed in the DELL > > docs and bios... > > Be really careful. The windows boot loader should be able to boot a > freebsd install for you. I have never had a Windows MBR work to boot FreeBSD. On the other hand I have never had a FreeBSD MBR fail to boot any MS-Win system. So, I wonder at your comment here. > Dell usually ship their machines with a small > partition at the front of the drive (at least, they did last time I > received one). That partition is at an odd offset and didn't agree with > the FBSD partition editor: I found this out the hard way. Things may > have changed since then; I usually nuke the dell partition anyway. I have never had to correct any partition/slice alignment when using the standard FreeBSD install. I ignore that Diagnostic slice that Dell puts on - just leave it there as slice 1, leave MS there as slice 2 and put FreeBSD on slice 3 - or sometimes I put a FAT32 on as slice 3 to use for communication if the MS is NTFS, and then put FreeBSD on slice 4. There has never been any problem with any alignment or offset. I shrink the MS-Win slice(primary partition) down with Partition Magic and use that to define the 1 (or 2) extra primary partition(s) (2 if I add that fst32) and then use the standard FreeBSD fdisk/bsdlabel/newfs either directly or through sysinstall to define the slices, mark the FreeBSD slice bootable, divide the FreeBSD slice in to partitions and build filesystems on the FreeBSD partitions. If I make the fat32 slice, I leave that alone because nothing else needs to be done to read/write it in MS-DOS mode. ////jerry > > jan > > PS. I should say that my bad experience with the partition editor is a > few years old; I've not tried again recently with new Dell kit. I have been doing this the way I describe since 1998 with no problem. /jrm > > -- > jan grant, ISYS, University of Bristol. http://www.bris.ac.uk/ > Tel +44 (0)117 3317661 http://ioctl.org/jan/ > Axioms speak louder than words. > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
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