Preserving Windows 10 partition whilst installing FreeBSD

[balanga]

My recently acquired ThinkPad X1 Carbon comes with Windows 10 installed on a 225GB SSD and currently has around 180GB free. I'd like to install FreeBSD on this system, but still have access to Windows 10. Does anyone have any advice on how to set about it?

The first thing I need to do is backup the existing system so that I can restore if something fails (which in all likelihood it will) and I'd like to backup to my FreeNAS box, Windows cannot see it. ie it doesn't see any SAMBA shares, although can ping the system. I'm not aware of doing anything on FreeNAS to enable my Windows 7 system to access it. On Win7 I just need to run net use v: \\FREENAS\REPO and it works, but on Win10 I get an error about "your organization's security policies block unauthosried guess access" which does not seem correct. What could I have overlooked?

 

[Ampera]

If it has EFI support, then using an EFI chainloader like GRUB would make this fairly easy. Just install GRUB (I usually use Arch Linux for this), generate a config using grub-mkconfig, and add EFI chainloading options to load the Windows bootloader and FreeBSD bootloader. The rest is just partitioning and a manual install.

 

[pacija]

My recently acquired ThinkPad X1 Carbon comes with Windows 10 installed on a 225GB SSD and currently has around 180GB free. I'd like to install FreeBSD on this system, but still have access to Windows 10. Does anyone have any advice on how to set about it?

I am triple-booting my ThinkPad T440 between Windows, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I use rEFInd for native UEFI boot, you should be able to find enough info online to get you going.

The first thing I need to do is backup the existing system so that I can restore if something fails (which in all likelihood it will) and I'd like to backup to my FreeNAS box, Windows cannot see it. ie it doesn't see any SAMBA shares, although can ping the system. I'm not aware of doing anything on FreeNAS to enable my Windows 7 system to access it. On Win7 I just need to run net use v: \\FREENAS\REPO and it works, but on Win10 I get an error about "your organization's security policies block unauthosried guess access" which does not seem correct. What could I have overlooked?

This sounds like your Windows 10 is part of Windows Domain, where policies are set via Domain GPOs. Most probably allowed SMB and NTLM versions and security settings on your Windows 10 do not match those offered by FreeNAS. If you just need to transfer files to FreeNAS use WinSCP.