From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Aug 3 10:25:29 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mail1.its.rpi.edu (mail1.its.rpi.edu [128.113.100.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B194D14F20 for ; Tue, 3 Aug 1999 10:25:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.acs.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail1.its.rpi.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id NAA58556 for ; Tue, 3 Aug 1999 13:24:08 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <37A6CA97.1F0DA32F@cdsec.com> References: <37A6CA97.1F0DA32F@cdsec.com> Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 13:24:15 -0400 To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: Multiple versions of FreeBSD on one HDD Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 12:55 PM +0200 8/3/99, Graham Wheeler wrote: >Hi all > >I am trying to install both 2.2.8 and 3.2 on a single 17Gb HDD, >but am not having much luck. I am also interested in doing things like this, and my initial attempts didn't work quite the way I had hoped. Earlier I had a dual-boot setup with WinNT and FreeBSD 2.2.5, using the booteasy loader. I managed to get that going easily enough, even though I didn't have any clue about what I was doing, so after I replaced the HD (for unrelated reasons) I thought I'd get more ambitious. So, armed with a brand new hard 4-gig SCSI disk, I installed WinNT, and had it create several partitions which I expected to use for other OS's. This install went fine. I then went to install FreeBSD 2.2.8, only to realize that all the partitions WinNT created were extended partitions in one real partition. So, I used the fdisk-part of the install to blow away those partitions and create three new partitions. I installed 2.2.8 in one of those, but told it that I wanted "nothing" done for a boot loader (because I planned to install PowerBoot, but I didn't have those disks yet). If I booted off the CD-ROM, I could then switch to this 2.2.8 install and it worked fine. The thing is, I couldn't boot up off the hard disk anymore. Apparently something in the freebsd install resulted in an invalid partition table. I assumed this was because I had fdisk-ed the second partition that winNT had created into three partitions, so I went and reinstalled WinNT in the first partition. At that point I could boot either system (using the CD when I wanted to boot off the freebsd system). I then installed Freebsd 3.2-stable in the third partition. Since I didn't need to fdisk anything, and I said I didn't want to install any boot-loader, I figured this would be safe. Again, I ended up with an unbootable HD. I could boot either freebsd system by first booting off a CD. By now the floppies for PowerBoot had come, so I tried installing that. I could now boot the HD, and PowerBoot can see the two partitions with freebsd installed (it even recognizes them as freebsd). Right now, my situation is that: - If I select WinNT at the PowerBoot menu, it comes up fine. Everything looks about as I'd expect. - If I select 2.2.8 at the PowerBoot menu, it comes up with one error message about "no /boot/loader", but then it comes right up in the 2.2.8 system. So this works fine, although it looks odd. - If I select 3.2 at the PowerBoot menu, it comes up with two messages about "invalid partition", one about "no boot loader", and then it can't automatically boot up anything. The interesting thing is that I'm in the 2.2.8 bootloader at this point, not the 3.2 one. It seems to want to boot 'da(0,a)/kernel', but if I type in 'da(0,e)/kernel', then it boots up fine. My last partition is meant for installing OpenBSD, but I wasn't ready to do that yet. Later I was talking with one of the other guys here, and I went to show him what I did by trying to do another freebsd install into that 4th partition. Much to my surprise, it won't *let* me install into that partition. (note that I wanted to try PowerBoot because I also have a second hard disk, and I want to install Win98 on that one, along with BeOS and maybe some other OS's. It seemed to me that multi-disk situations could use something more than booteasy). So, my guess is that my primary problem is that I have only a vague idea of what I'm doing... Where is a good point to start looking for a better idea? I tried searching the web site for "multi-boot", but that didn't turn up much. I have a number of questions from doing this: 1. why does the install turn my HD unbootable? (invalid partition table). I didn't ask it to re-fdisk anything, and I didn't ask for it to change my boot loader. 2. I have the BIOS option on so I can boot off larger hard disks, and indeed it seems I can boot to the first three partitions. Why can't I get to that final one? 3. Can I get it so that booting off the third partition will smoothly boot into 3.2-stable? 4. given the rapidly-expanding size of HD's, would it be useful to support installs into DOS-style extended partitions? Or are they a problem which we're better off to avoid? --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message