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NT and FreeBSD co-existing on the same physical disk
Installing FreeBSD Posted by Joe on Monday April 16, @03:44PM
from the dept.
Is there a tutuorial that specifically deals with installing FreeBSD on a machine with NT4 Workstation presently installed?
This tutorial doesn't mention NT: http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/multi-os/index.html and I would like to dual-boot NT Workstation and FreeBSD on a single IDE disk that presently is consumed by a single primary partition formatted as NTFS. I don't care if the NT Loader or BootEasy is used as the boot manager as long as the FreeBSD install doesn't nuke the existing NT Loader and leave me with nothing to boot NT. I have Partition Magic to shrink my NTFS to make room for FreeBSD so is there anything I need to be informed about here that would avoid a whole lot of trouble?

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    The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them.
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    Re: NT and FreeBSD co-existing on the same physical disk
    by Jason on Tuesday April 17, @09:36AM
    I used to have FreeBSD co-existing with NT4-WS. I believe the FreeBSD boot manager fully supports it. So, I guess the issue is partitioning. Does your NT4 installation use the entire disk?

    Jason
    [ Add a Reply to this ]
    • Re: NT and FreeBSD co-existing on the same physical disk
      by Joe on Tuesday April 17, @11:02AM
      Yes it does and I plan on using PartitionMagic to shrink it down to make room for FreeBSD. The issue is i hope freeBSD installer recognizes the shrunken NTFS partition and leaves it alone and what does it do to the NT Loader (ex. i need to dual-boot) I haven't seen a tutorial that covers NT at either BSD Diary or the home site of FreeBSD which is kind of odd.
      [ Reply to this ]
      • Re: NT and FreeBSD co-existing on the same physical disk
        by Jason on Thursday April 19, @10:34AM
        Joe,

        I posted to the comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc newsgroup yesterday, and there was an interesting response.

        You should go check it out. The post is entitled booteasy.

        I think another option is to install as you describe and then use a boot floppy to boot freebsd, that way you can leave the master boot record alone (the installer gives you the option of no change to mbr). This is what I did when I dual booted NT4 and FreeBSD.
        [ Reply to this ]
        • Re: NT and FreeBSD co-existing on the same physical disk
          by Joe on Saturday April 21, @07:42PM
          Very good. Thank you.
          [ Reply to this ]
          • Re: NT and FreeBSD co-existing on the same physical disk
            by Rich on Friday May 11, @01:18AM
            The first thing I would do is to make an emergancy boot disk in NT with the rdisk utility (from the command line). Go ahead and update your current configuration and make the floppy. This floppy will allow you to boot your NT if your masterboot record gets screwed up. I have looked at boot easy and, if I recall correctly, it really wasn't that easy. The NT boot loader is much easier. There must be a how-to some where on how to put FreeBSD onto the NT loader menu. I have put Linux and dos on the menu with very little effort. I would load FreeBSD into your spare space and burn the boot loader onto the root partition of the installation NOT the Master boot record of the drive. Then I would copy the kernel to a floppy disk so that you can boot your partition if the NT thing doesn't work. Then burn a copy of the first 512 bytes of your root partition (I forget the names of ide drives) with the dd command (man dd) into a file and copy that file to a floppy. Boot your NT and copy that file to your NT partition and edit the c:\boot.ini file (run attrib -a -s h -r first) to plce the the loading of that file on your NT menu. This is a very breif and theoretical overview. I have not done this before. I have done this with other operating systems but not FreeBSD. It has worked with Linux and dos/win9x. But it is worth a shot. Rich
            [ Reply to this ]
    Re: NT and FreeBSD co-existing on the same physical disk
    by Harvey on Tuesday June 12, @09:11AM
    Joe, I recently endeavored to install 4 Os's on 1 20 gig ide drive. Here's what I did/suggest. 1) I used partition magic to setup the disk how I wanted everything to look. 2) Installed Win2k professional, Win2k server, Mandrake Linux, finally FreeBSD 4.3-stable, in this order. Please note the order of installation. Win2k Professional does not play well with others (no option to bypass the bootmanager--so I installed it first) I installed the freebsd bootmanager because it doesn't care what OS's are installed and recognizes the partition type/os. All of this went pretty flawlessly.
    [ Add a Reply to this ]
    • Re: NT and FreeBSD co-existing on the same physical disk
      by Voloschuck Andrew on Saturday October 20, @06:33PM
      O-o-o friend I can't resolve following problem (maybe U can tell me what will I do)??
      In my 40 Gb IDE I've installed
      1) Win 2K Advanced Server
      2) In second 800 Mb =)) IDE : Win98 with Partition Magic 6 + ntfs utility (to retreive access to Win2000 volume) All sems good before I install freebsd
      3) FreeBSD on first physicall drive an BSD's loader overload NTFS's loader and my Win2000 doesn't recognized as from BSD's loader just as WIn98 =( How can I configure BSD's or maybe another confs to compel my Win2000 boot properly?
      [ Reply to this ]
      • Re: NT and FreeBSD co-existing on the same physical disk
        by Jason on Saturday October 20, @11:11PM
        I have seen questions asked about dual booting FreeBSD and NT many times, and I believe the simple solution is to use a boot manager that easily recognizes both FreeBSD and Windows NT/2000.

        Take a look at the gag boot manager. I understand it works great, and can be configured from a single bootable floppy. If it works out, please post a reply and let us all know how it goes.
        [ Reply to this ]
    Re: NT and FreeBSD co-existing on the same physical disk
    by bothorax on Thursday August 22, @01:46AM
    Go there: http://www.irost.org/FAQ/FREEBSD/FAQ/FAQ101.htm
    [ Add a Reply to this ]
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