From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Jul 4 02:23:07 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CC0B037B401 for ; Fri, 4 Jul 2003 02:23:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phadfa.ph.adfa.edu.au (phadfa.ph.adfa.edu.au [131.236.224.40]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3196243F93 for ; Fri, 4 Jul 2003 02:23:06 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from pxt@ph.adfa.edu.au) Received: from TEMPATARACHOKE (h42246.pems.adfa.edu.au [131.236.42.246]) by phadfa.ph.adfa.edu.au (8.12.9/8.12.8) with SMTP id h649HlNm023229 for ; Fri, 4 Jul 2003 19:17:47 +1000 (EST) Message-ID: <007601c3420d$fe638950$f62aec83@TEMPATARACHOKE> From: "Pisut Tempatarachoke" To: Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2003 19:23:56 +1000 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-874" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000 Subject: Help needed please - Thinkpad A31p & FreeBSD 4.8 Installation (LONG) X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 04 Jul 2003 09:23:08 -0000 Hi, I've just got my TP A31p and now look forward to installing FreeBSD 4.8 (4-CDROM set) on it. I'm very new to FreeBSD and really hope someone could give me some advices. Thanks a lot in advance. The laptop has no floppy drive and came with a 60 GB hard drive which consisted of two FAT32 partitions (slices): - 55 GB Windows XP Pro and - 5 GB IBM recovery partition. I used BootIT NG to shrink the XP partition down to 23 GB. This left me with a free space of 32 GB. Then, I created a 9 GB FAT32 partition within the free space hoping to use it as a data partition which can be read and written from both XP and FreeBSD. So, now I have - 23 GB Windows XP Pro - 9 GB FAT32 for sharing data between OS's - 21 GB free space (unformatted) for FreeBSD (I havn't installed it yet) and - 5 GB IBM recovery partition ???My first questions - Is this a sound method of slicing my disk? Does the 9 GB FAT32 partition really need to be there? Am I wrong in thinking that FAT32 is accessible from both XP and FreeBSD? I've read posts somewhere that I MUST NOT install FreeBSD boot manager during the installation because it will overwrite the master boot record (MBR), and as a result XP will be unbootable. I then must leave the MBR untouched until I finish with the FreeBSD installation and copy /boot/boo1 to another computer on a network (A31p doesn't have a floppy drive). Then, I have to boot from a FreeBSD CD to enter FDisk and make sure the XP partition is set bootable. Reboot it and once I'm in XP, I can copy /boot/boot1 from the networked computer to C:\BOOTSECT.BSD and include a line C:\BOOTSECT.BSD="FreeBSD" in my BOOT.INI file. This will give me a boot-from-FreeBSD-slice option the next time I boot my laptop. ???My second questions - Is this approach workable? How do I copy /boot/boot1 to another computer on a network? Can I copy it onto my 9 GB FAT32 slice instead, as I'm not sure if I will be smart enough to set up the LAN connection correctly? Could I write it onto a blank CD? What are the commands involved? ???My third questions - Could someone please suggest how I should partition my FreeBSD slice? As I have 768 MB RAM, here is what I have in mind:- / 512 MB swap 2048 MB /var 512 MB /tmp 1024 MB /usr Rest of disk I have no idea how much disk space I should allocate to /, /var, and /tmp. Can I change them at a later stage? What are UFS and UFS+S and how are they different? ???Forth question - Is it a good idea to just install everything during the first installation? Any recommendations on what I should or should not install please? ???Last questions - During the monitor configuration stage, I have to supply the infomation on a) the horizontal sync range, b) the vertical sync range, and c) the LCD make. How do I find out this information? Does anyone with an A31p know please? Thank you all very very much & any other tips are also welcome. Best regards Tempo