*BSD News Article 52759


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From: tsbarry@bnr.ca (Barry Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Windows NT and FreeBSD
Date: 16 Oct 1995 16:38:13 GMT
Organization: Bell Northern Research
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Steve Moubray (smoubray@dcc.com) wrote:
: I need to run MS-DOS, Windows NT and FreeBSD on one 4G SCSI drive.
: What is the easiest way to get FreeBSD and Windows NT to co-exist?  I
: installed FreeBSD after Windows NT and even though I selected to leave
: the boot record intact, FreeBSD ate it up and I could no longer run
: NT.  Luckily I made a backup.

: When I load one of the operating systems I'm there for a few hours so
: I don't really need a quick way to go from one OS to another.  I just
: need a way that is simple with little risk of problems.

: TIA

BTEASY has a problem with Windows NT. It uses a few bytes too many
of the MBR. I am developing patches - mail me for an updated BTEASY.
The symptoms are that Windows NT will report that there no signature
on the disk and ask you for permission to write the signature. That
write will remove BTEASY. Further if you have changed the driver
letter of you Windows NT boot partition that driver letter assignment
will be lost.

You will need to arrange that FreeBSD is completely within the 1st
1024 cylinders on the disk. If not it will not be bootable. The BTEasy
code cannot load the bootblock if any of the partition is above 1024
cylinders.

Try this layout of the disk:

	MSDOS partition
	FreeBSD partition < end below 1024 cylinders
	MSDOS logical partitions
	NTFS partition

I currently have

	MSDOS 6.2 with Windows 3.11
	Windows 95
	Windows NT 3.51
	FreeBSD 2.0.5R

Split over a pair of 1G drives.

			BArry