*BSD News Article 52886


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From: mbreed@cs.tamu.edu (Michael B. Reed)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Help needed with partitioning
Date: 18 Oct 1995 01:29:04 GMT
Organization: Texas A&M Department of Computer Engineering, College Station, TX
Lines: 36
Message-ID: <461l90$efg@news.tamu.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sparc86.cs.tamu.edu

Okay, I've got two hard drives now.  I had DOS and OS/2 living on the old one,
and I've moved things around to look like the following:

Disk 1 
OS/2 Boot Manager (Primary)
DOS (Primary)
OS/2 (Primary)
DOS stuff (Logical drive D:)
Free space (I'd like to put FreeBSD here)

Disk 2 
OS/2 stuff (Logical drive E:)
Free space (intended for FreeBSD swap)

Here's the problem.  When I tried to install FreeBSD, it didn't like being
put in that free space at the end of drive 1.  The name in the partition
editor was 'X' instead of 'wd0s1' or some such.  So, I'm inferring that it
wants to be in the first four partitions, or maybe in a primary partition.
I can't move DOS or OS/2's boot partitions off of disk 1.  Now, if FreeBSD
really really wants to be in a primary partition, I've got a problem, since
you can only have 4 primary or 3 primary/1 extended partition on a drive,
and I don't want to have to move the 'DOS stuff' partition off of disk 1.

So here's my list of questions.  First, does FreeBSD really need to be on
a primary partition, or can I get away with swapping the free space and the
'DOS stuff' partition around in the hopes that it will name the FreeBSD 
partition properly?  Next, what about FreeBSD's boot manager?  Does it need
to be installed in its own primary partition, and will it work in place
of OS/2's Boot Manager?

Any suggestions on how I could go about setting this up would be greatly
appreciated.

-- 
-Brad Reed        mbreed@tamu.edu