dualboot ZFS and Win7

R

roelof

Hello,

If I want to install FreeBSD on the second partition of my disk with the 9.0 disk. What is the name of the partition of the FreeBSD partition.

Roelof
 
Depends on the partition scheme, MBR or GPT. But Windows 7 is almost certainly MBR, which would make the second partition s2. No idea about using ZFS in an MBR partition or how to boot from that.
 
Thanks, I will google for that. So I have to use ad0s2 as ZFS partition if I understand you right.
 
Windows can be installed on GPT but only if you are able to UEFI boot the installer. OEMs tend to use GPT too. You can tell if there's a 100MB hidden ESP partition (which is actually FAT32), a 128MB MSR (MicroSoft Recovery) and the rest NTFS for Windows.

You should also be able to tell using the Windows diskpart.exe. The command SHOW DISK will show an asterisk (*) in the GPT column.

Be very, very careful with this setup. I already buggered up mine.
Thread 35897
 
Hello,

I have no asterisk in the gpt column. The link you gave me doesn't work. I get a No Thread specified. If you followed a valid link, please notify the administrator error message.
 
SirDice said:
Windows can be installed on GPT but only if you are able to UEFI boot the installer. OEMs tend to use GPT too. You can tell if there's a 100MB hidden ESP partition (which is actually FAT32), a 128MB MSR (MicroSoft Recovery) and the rest NTFS for Windows.
Click to expand...

Yes, but most people don't have the minimum requirements for it yet. It needs UEFI in the motherboard ROM and 64-bit Windows 7.
 
I looked in my BIOS but no sign of UEFI. I have a 64-bit Win7 and I have this motherboard ASUSTeK Computer INC. P5G41T-M LX (LGA775)

Roelof
 
I think the usual way of doing this is to make an MBR-style partition table with two slices (Windows and FreeBSD), and then put a ZFS partition into the FreeBSD slice, causing it to be named /dev/ad0s2a. Then you should be able to load bootcode into both /dev/ad0 and /dev/ad0s2 using fdisk(8) and bsdlabel(8) (making sure you load the /boot/boot0 and /boot/zfsboot files)

(maybe the bootcode installation for MBR style drives can also be handled by gpart(8), but I never tried that myself)
 
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