Multi-boot install: partition sizes and install order

V

vodoomoth

Hi all,
first of, in case a similar question has already been asked, I apologize for repeating it; I didn't find the info I'm looking for in previous posts.

I own a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Xi2528 laptop with a dual hdd raid mirror configuration. My intention is to use no raid at all and reclaim the 500 GB of space in total (too many video files; backup will be devoted to an external drive). I want to take that opportunity to have 4 OSes: the dreadful and dog slow Vista that came with the laptop two years ago, Haiku, FreeBSD and maybe a flavor of Linux (probably Ubuntu as I'm already tired of reading pages and pages of documentation).

What I envision is this:
- first HDD: OSes and apps and secondary data space
- second HDD: swaps, encrypted partition and main data space

I have a few questions though:
1- Is 10 GB a usable size in case FreeBSD becomes my main OS? Between the 45 GB that my current Vista install eats and the 2 GB the guys from Haiku recommend, I wonder where FreeBSD stands. The documentation I've been reading (for instance, http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/install-pre.html and its French version) doesn't seem up to date because of the disk sizes mentioned in it; these sizes are nowhere near what is commonly available these days (see section 2.1).
2- I know that oblivious-to-the-rest-of-the-world Windows has to be installed first but is there a specific order which I should install FreeBSD with respect to the other OSes?

Thanks.
 
10G is a little tight for a full FreeBSD install if you're going to use typical xorg and Firefox stuff. If you're careful with distfiles and cleaning, it works. If the GUI bloat is avoided, it's more than enough. One trick to maximize limited space is to not create the typical separate filesystems for /, /var, /tmp, and /usr. Free space is free space when everything is in one big /.

What order? Likely it will be a fight regardless. EasyBCD makes the Windows multi-boot pretty easy.

VM software is worth considering as an alternative to multi-booting. One big advantage is that you don't have to restart--or even stop--using one OS to use another.
 
First 10GiB is enough for FreeBSD. Having installed all(GENERIC) kernel modules and userland with debug symbols (as well as all ports that get them by default), with kde and most of it's dependency bloat as well as backups to any installed package I have:

Code: 
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/ad6s1a    989M    543M    367M    60%   /
/dev/ad6s1e    7.7G    5.6G    1.5G    78%   /usr
/dev/ad6s1f     25G    2.0G     21G     9%   /usr/home
/dev/ad6s1d    1.9G    147M    1.6G     8%   /var

I don't have a tmp or swap partition which is stupid (but works well enough if desktopping is all you do).

Second, it won't really matter which order you'll install OSes. If Windows wipes off FreeBSD's loader, boot with a BSD rescue or system install disk and reinstall the loader by selecting fdisk (in sysinstall), not changing anything and selecting to install the boot loader when asked. Likewise, if Windows get's messed up, start with a Windows installation disk and select rescue mode, then automatic repair should do the work.

BSD's loader is good enough to boot Windows, and i saw threads about how to get Windows' loader to boot (Free)BSD. Linux might end up not being loadable by either though, so you'll most probably end up using grub.
 
Thank you for your answers. Unfortunately, splitting the RAID configuration (in collaboration with my not reading what's written on the screen with more attention) led to the BIOS RAID tool overwriting the whole MBR, i.e. boot code and partition table... Why did some dev think that it was mandatory to overwrite it is well beyond me.

I've desperately resisted a reinstall but after spending the whole night (10+ hours) trying to recover a bootable system, I surrendered. Between the initial Vista install, service packs and going back and forth from a GParted live key and the two disks, my laptop must have rebooted at least 150 times in the last 24 hours or so.

I didn't lose any data but that was painful as I've been burnt before by placing my data on the C drive. Third reinstall in barely more than two years.
One stupid MBR sector holds access to the disk and the recovery on the Vista install disk is a pathetic joke; it's incapable of fixing the BCD and persists in finding two windows installations despite the partition type of one being set to EB (BeOS). Thank you Phoenix, JMicron, Fujitsu and Microsoft for your brilliantly useless assistance in those times of disaster recovery. I'm so pissed off to have lost all that time.

I owe it to testdisk, fdisk and gparted to have not lost any data.

Anyway, back to topic: I'm set to use 10 GB for both FreeBSD and Haiku, and 15 for the Linux distro with only swaps on separate partitions where applicable. Thanks again. I hope to be haunting these forums soon in the future; I'm more than ever looking forward to ditching vista and this laptop that I both hate like I've never hated any tech piece before.

@wblock: I had also considered VMs but having used XP as a guest on Mac OS X, I've understood how important the underlying filesystem performance is. I can't make an honest evaluation of an OS with it being limited by NTFS in a VirtualBox VM for instance. I can also afford to spare that disk space so the disk install is the way to go to me.
 
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