Dual Booting Win98 and FBSD

Dominic Mitchell dom at happygiraffe.net
Sat Oct 7 20:10:34 BST 2000


On Sat, Oct 07, 2000 at 04:09:53PM +0000, Andrew Boothman wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I would like to dual boot Win'98 and FreeBSD-STABLE from a 
> couple of weeks ago.
> 
> I already have FreeBSD-STABLE installed on a 3Gb drive on the 
> system that is almost completely full.
> 
> What I would like to do is to install Win'98 on the first half of a new 
> 20Gb drive and make that the 'primary disk' (master on first IDE 
> Interface) so this will be the disk that the BIOS tries to boot. I 
> would then like to give the second half of the drive to a new 
> FreeBSD slice.

A word of warning.  make you sure you use at leaste FreeBSD 4.1 or later
as it contains a fix for booting from partitions over 8Gb.

> Now, If I go ahead and install Win'98 on the new primary disk, how 
> will I get BootEasy installed on the new disk, that after all isn't 
> going to contain a FreeBSD partition to boot off?

You can use boot0cfg to install boot0 onto a drive as you see fit.

> And if I do move the existing drive onto the secondary IDE interface 
> won't this confuse FreeBSD as it will look in the wrong place for the 
> kernel and the other exisiting partitions?

Yes.  :-)

You should be able to boot into single user mode, do "mount -u -o rw /"
(to get root read-write) and edit /etc/vfstab to clear things up.  You
may also need to edit stuff under /boot.

> How should I get around this? Can someone think of a procedure to 
> follow so this goes smoothly?

The best advice is:

* backup.  Don't be without a backup.  :-)

* cd.  Make sure you have either a bootable cd and a fixit floppy or the
  boot disks and a fixit floppy.  Then, if things *do* go pear shaped,
  you stand a chance of getting things back to normal working order.

Personally, I think the best way of going about this is to start from
scratch.  Take the 3gb drive out, and leave it alone until afterwards.
Then, install win98 on the first drive[1].  When that's done, install
FreeBSD from scratch on the 2nd partition.  At that point, you can plug
your 3Gb drive in, copy the data that was useful to you off of it, then
reuse it for storing MP3's or something.

It's a bit long winded, but it's probably the best way of getting things
working.

-Dom 

[1] Be careful, the default options for win98 install doesn't always
give you a chance to partition your hard drive before proceeding with
the install.  It just assumes you want to use the whole hard disk...
There is a way out of it, though.  Wish I could remember how.  Probably
by pressing F5 or F8 when the win98 setup disk boots, actually.




More information about the Ukfreebsd mailing list