Two storage devices

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Deleted member 57009

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Good afternoon everyone,

I purchased a second hand laptop (Dell Precision 7510) that came with a 500GB HDD and 256GB SSD (it might be PCIe nvme but I'm not home to check this at the moment).

It came with Windows 10 pro which I wiped and had overwritten with a number of other OS to test out. I have now got a working copy of FreeBSD installed on one of the drives which I'm probably going to have to redo (I have another post elsewhere about why I'll have to do this).

I've never owned a laptop with more than one storage device before and think I've made a hash of it. There are a number of linux distros floating around between the two drives and a windows bootloader.

So I have a few questions about what I should do next if anyone can offer up advice.

Is there a way of wiping both drives clean ready for a fresh install?

Can I use both physical drives to install and run operating systems? If so, how do I switch between the two? Is there a bootloader that will recognise both drives or will I need to F2 each time I boot up to choose a drive?

Which would be the better storage device to use for FreeBSD the HDD or the SSD?

Is there a tool or set of tools I can use for the job and do they have documentation?

Ideally if both drives are usable I'd like to use both and have an OS on each i.e FreeBSD on one and Ubuntu on another.

Any advice would be great.

Thanks,
Nick
 
Just install FBSD in the SSD and use the HDD as you /home partition or a backup partition.

tenchu said:
Is there a way of wiping both drives clean ready for a fresh install?
Click to expand...
The installation process already does that. You just need to delete those entries in you BIOS config page.

tenchu said:
Ideally if both drives are usable I'd like to use both and have an OS on each i.e FreeBSD on one and Ubuntu on another.
Click to expand...
You can, but you have a few caveats with your setup. HDD are to slow for a desktop OS. I don't recommend you to use it as a installation disk. And besides that, to do a dual boot between bsd and any other OS you need to use the boot menu from your BIOS or install something like rEFInd
 
"Is there a way of wiping both drives clean ready for a fresh install?"
Well, there is dd(1), choose the of parameter wisely! However, I think for freeBSD you can mostly rely on gpart(8): gpart destroy ... <geom>. I don't know much about the quirks of other OS-es that may be thrown off track by other disk OS remnants though.

"Can I use both physical drives to install and run operating systems?"
Yes, probably, but it depends on your firmware/BIOS options. If your laptop has an UEFI firmware, you have a lot more, albeit low-level, options.

"Which would be the better storage device to use for FreeBSD the HDD or the SSD?"
Unless you're adding/installing lots of add ons extra software, you should be able to install a fully usefull (inc. X-GUI) on that SSD easily. Other OS-es: YMMV.

"Is there a tool or set of tools I can use for the job and do they have documentation?"
Why not consider running Linux on top/inside FreeBSD; see Linux Binary Compatibility.

If you have lots of data, consider off loading that onto the spinning rust HDD, or speed wise much better, consider replacing that with an affordable SSD.
 
Erichans said:
"Is there a way of wiping both drives clean ready for a fresh install?"
Well, there is dd(1), choose the of parameter wisely! However, I think for freeBSD you can mostly rely on gpart(8): gpart detroy ... <geom>. I don't know much about the quirks of other OS-es that may be thrown off track by other disk OS remnants though.

"Can I use both physical drives to install and run operating systems?"
Yes, probably, but it depends on you firmware/BIOS options. If your laptop has an UEFI firmware, you have a lot more, albeit low-level, options.

"Which would be the better storage device to use for FreeBSD the HDD or the SSD?"
Unless you're adding/installing lots of add ons extra software, you should be able to install a fully usefull (inc. X-GUI) on that SSD. Other OS-es: YMMV.

"Is there a tool or set of tools I can use for the job and do they have documentation?"
Why not consider running Linux on top/inside FreeBSD; see Linux Binary Compatibility.

If you have lots of data, consider off loading that onto the spinning rust HDD, or speed wise much better, consider replacing that with an affordable SSD.
Click to expand...
So would I be better off just installing FreeBSD on the 256GB SSD (PCIe nvme) and wiping the HDD clean?

If so how would I go about it?

Also, would I be able to use the HDD as attached storage? Again, how would I do it? Would BSD recognise the device automatically so I could use it?

As far as other OS I'll use my Windows PC with virtual box to play around with them. I'm sure FreeBSD has something similar but I'm unaware and unfamiliar with it.

Thanks,
Nick
 
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