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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!solace!nntp.uio.no!news.apfel.de!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD w/ Win95; Need Help Installing Date: 20 Jan 1997 21:08:08 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 54 Message-ID: <5c0mro$q2k@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <32E30D3B.4609@vt.edu> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:34225 "Brian D. Salomon" <bsalomon@vt.edu> wrote: > I'm presently running Win95 and want to install FreeBSD. > My drive came partitioned with Win95 installed on "C:"; > can I install FreeBSD on my "D:" drive without losing my > C-drive data? Yes, though we don't take any responsibility for lost data. :) > If so, how would I go about this? Simply boot the installation floppy, and walk through the menus. Select a `manual' installation, this way you can walk through each menu without any particular sequence. As long as you don't hit the ``committ'' (or ``extract'') buttons (and answer the next question with yes), nothing will be actually done yet. Basically, select both disks in the partition editor (so the boot selector will be written to your first drive, too -- you'll need it), but allocate a FreeBSD slice only on the second disk. (The first disk doesn't have more than a megabyte or two free space, so unless you try to `D)elete' something first, you wouldn't even be able to use the first disk for the installation.) > A potential problem is that my drive is 2.5GB. Drive C has > 2.1GB and drive D has been allocated 400MB. I wasn't clear > on what the FAQ had to say about the problems of partitions > over 528MB.. Can I boot from a drive over this size? Yes. FreeBSD can handle up to 31.5 GB per IDE drive. :-) However, you need to put the ``/'' (root) partition below what the BIOS believes is 1024 cylinders. Since the usual root partition size is about 20 or 30 megabytes only, this is normally not a big problem (if FreeBSD resides on a drive by itself). A note of warning: make sure the FreeBSD ``partition editor'' uses the exact same geometry for the disk as you've told your BIOS. For empty disks, it sometimes errs on this, and suggests you another geometry (which won't really work afterwards -- installation goes fine, but you can't boot that drive). > If I ever get things running, will it be safe to access > the Win95 files from FreeBSD? Unfortunately the answer is: it depends. :-( MSDOSFS is known to be broken, though another half of the people using it claims it works for them. So be careful. Try to backup important data first. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)