David Morton wrote:
I have been out of work so long (since being diagnosed as autistic and
scared) that even as an IT professional, I now get very anxious about
messing with my PC.
However, I got a magazine that included FreeBSD/i386 6.2 on the DVD and I
have always wanted to play with BSD. My past experience included UNIX
System V, some Solaris 7 or 8, and other variants, so you know a bit of
history.
Anyway, I have a laptop preinstalled with Vista Home Premium and I would
like to also run BSD on it. In reading your installation documentation, I
do not see anything that suggests I can install FreeBSD onto my PC without
wiping Windows.
I also have restricted web access so cannot access you web site, so I would
like to know if FreeBSD will install in a way that will not kill Windows on
my PC?
I have to ask this, because I once had an old PC and put Solaris on it, and
that required a dedicated drive. The PC is now dead, so I have to make it
all work on one machine.
Thanks, David
David Morton
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AUSTRALIA
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Since I have a laptop with vista and FreeBSD, I will give a few quick
hints that will save you time and despair:
- You will need to "shrink" your windows partition to make room for
FreeBSD to create it's slice.
Now, I don't know what type of laptop you got, but since it is a Vista
laptop, it is obviously one of the newest models. In most cases, disk
partitions on these are:
1. Recovery partition for the pre-installed OS
2. Main Windows installation
3. Data Partition
The first (recovery) partition does not have a drive letter assigned to
it in Windows, so it is not directly "viewable" from Windows explorer.
The size is usually around 7-8Gb.
The rest of the disk is usually split between C: (Windows) and D: (for
user storage). If this is the case, you would probably prefer to shrink
the partition assigned to D:, since Vista needs quite some space for
itself and the applications. To shrink the partition you could try
Norton Partition Magic, or, even better, download and run the GParted
live CD.
If you intend to experiment with ports, packages and the like on
FreeBSD, I suggest you leave a couple of Gigabytes for the slice. It all
depends of course on what you plan to install. Bear in mind FreeBSD's
slice must be created as primary partition, so you must not have more
than three primary partitions on your disk prior to creating the slice.
When installing FreeBSD, you will be asked whether you would like to
install a Boot Manager. Answer NO (select to leave the MBR untouched).
When installation is finished, reboot to Vista (it will be your only
option anyway), and download and install EasyBCD (it is a free program,
google for it). With this, in a few clicks, you will create an option to
boot FreeBSD in Vista's boot menu. It is trivial as the program detects
the FreeBSD partition automatically.
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