Topic 26 of 29: Dual Boot Windows and UNIX (ie. FreeBSD)
Sat, Nov 2, 2002 (06:54) |
Paul Terry Walhus (terry)
How do you set up a dual boot machine to start up in either Windows 2000 or UNIX, ie. FreeBSD. This topic tackles that problem because, to me, this is a mystery.
2 responses total.
Topic 26 of 29 [unix]: Dual Boot Windows and UNIX (ie. FreeBSD)
Response 1 of 2: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sat, Nov 2, 2002 (06:54) * 20 lines
This is kinda ancient, but I read about one guys woes with this issue:
At any rate, this more or less brings us to the present day, and to this brand-new TP560X sitting on my desk. The TP560X comes standard with a 12.1" TFT active-matrix screen, 32MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive. I upgraded the memory to 96MB total and replaced the hard drive with IBM's 6.4GB unit.
Thus begins my tale of woe.
The intent was to partition the HD with 2GB for Win95 (to accommodate all the bloatware that comes with using Microsoft Office, plus an assortment of grant proposals and other such Windows-centric stuff) and partition the remaining 4GB for FreeBSD. New ThinkPads come equipped with a great resource: The whole system can be restored from a CDrom and rescue floppy that comes with the unit. So, confident beyond a shadow of a doubt that this utility would work, I installed the new hard drive, formatted it with DOS FDISK and FORMAT, and prepared myself to re-install windows.
Moral 1: Never...NEVER give up your old MS-DOS floppies.
Moral 2: Never...NEVER trust any Windows rescue floppy to work.
I have a Sony PCMCIA cdrom that comes with an Adaptec SlimSCSI card. The documentation with the cdrom swears it supports every CDrom known to man -- IDE, SCSI, PCMCIA or otherwise. Except apparently the SlimSCSI. I couldn't get that part to work at all. I wasn't surprised, though, so I had a backup plan: use the Win95 Floppy Disk install set (28 floppies!) made from the *previous* TP560C's, two years ago.
My next error was to install FreeBSD before installing Win95. The lore on the internet (and in the handbook, and the FAQ) is that to dual-boot Operating systems both OS's must have their root partition located completely within the first 1024 cylinders. This was a problem, as FreeBSD was probing the drive and coming up with a number around 13,000 cylinders. No matter what size I made the root partitions nor how I broke things up, I could not dual-boot. Only the first OS on the drive was found.
The problem of course is that the BIOS in the laptop wanted to change the disk geometry. I got around this problem (after several days of punting around) by formatting the DOS partition using the DOS FORMAT program. This is mentioned in fine print in the FAQ, but might deserve more neon lights around it, at least for my sake. Once I did this, the whole 6.4GB drive suddenly appeared to have approximately 950 cylinders. My root partitions could be as big as I wanted, so I made Win95 take up the first 2GB just as I originally planned.
Now the operation began to move much more quickly. I installed FreeBSD from the 2.2.7-RELEASE cdrom, then added a whole mess of ports and made some of my personal customizations I've learned with time. Then I installed Windows from the 28 floppy-disk set over an afternoon, reinstalled "Booteasy" from the tools directory and I had a basic dual-booting laptop.
Topic 26 of 29 [unix]: Dual Boot Windows and UNIX (ie. FreeBSD)
Response 2 of 2: Paul Terry Walhus (terry) * Sat, Nov 2, 2002 (06:54) * 3 lines
The above from
http://www.daemonnews.org/199810/mobile.html
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