Solved GPT or MBR partitioning scheme for a Dual Boot Disk FreeBSD/Windows 7

O

obsigna

Profile disabled
I need to prepare a dual boot disk with FreeBSD 10.2 and Windows 7 which should run on a box with plain BIOS (no EFI). For FreeBSD alone, I would partition the disk with the GPT scheme. I like to have the whole FreeBSD system in an UFS on one partition and having only swap on a separate one. Now, I need one partition (NTFS) more for Windows 7, correct?

Sorry, for these dumb questions, but I have only a very bare installation experience with Windows:
  • Do I need to use MBR if I want to put a Windows 7 boot partition alongside the FreeBSD 10.2 ones, or may I stay with GPT?
  • Do I need a particular partition order - e.g. Windows first or FreeBSD first?
  • Anything else that I must consider?
Windows need not to see the UFS and FreeBSD need not to see the NTFS. VirtualBox is not an option, because I need to test the behaviour of a high speed DAQ-PCI-device for a customer project under Windows 7. At the same time I need to be able to start the box with FreeBSD, since it is my testing machine for various programming projects, and right now only one of this happens to target Windows.
 
Windows 7 does not want to boot from GPT. It might be possible to get it to do that with Grub or something similar, but that is hardly worth it. Use MBR.
 
wblock@ and protocelt. Thank you for your quick answers. I started already the installation, but it failed because it seems, that the Windows installer accepts only the first partition on the disk for installation, and in my first trial, I attributed the first partition to FreeBSD (my preferred system :). I started over again with:
Code: 
# gpart show
=>       63  312581745  ada0  MBR  (149G)
         63  157286367     1  ntfs  (75G)
  157286430  155295378     2  freebsd  (74G)

Now Windows Installation is running. Later I will restore the backed-up FreeBSD system, which will be easy going. However, please let me ask an additional question. Where do I place which dual boot loader?

PS: I found it, boot0cfg(8). -> Solved
 
When forced to dual-boot, I install Windows first because it lacks manners and will mess with partitions and bootcode. Because boot0cfg(8)'s bootcode is so bare-bones, I install EasyBCD and use that to set up the Windows loader.
 
wblock@ said:
When forced to dual-boot, I install Windows first because it lacks manners and will mess with partitions and bootcode. Because boot0cfg(8)'s bootcode is so bare-bones, I install EasyBCD and use that to set up the Windows loader.
Click to expand...
Personally, I've had some rather bad experiences with EasyBCD. And all you really need is bcdedit included with Windows to setup dual-booting.
 
I tested EasyBCD, and I got it to work. However, I was missing the behaviour of boot0, which automatically makes the last choice of the boot OS the new default one. I liked this feature very much, and for this reason I switched back to boot0.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top