Installing 9.1 without re-partitioning hard

[leeolives...@surewest.net]

Good afternoon, FreeBSD enthusiasts. I am attempting to install FreeBSD 9.1 on a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP. I am using bsdinstall. I do not wish for the partition table to be changed. How do I instruct bsdinstall to skip the re-partitioning step? It gives an error message that it cannot write a certain file because the medium is write-only. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Yours truly, Newby Lee

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[Damien Fleuriot]

On Mar 15, 2013 12:48 AM, <leeolives...@surewest.net> wrote:
>
> Good afternoon, FreeBSD enthusiasts. I am attempting to install FreeBSD
9.1 on a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP. I am using bsdinstall.
I do not wish for the partition table to be changed. How do I instruct
bsdinstall to skip the re-partitioning step? It gives an error message
that it cannot write a certain file because the medium is write-only. Any
suggestions would be appreciated. Yours truly, Newby Lee
>

You're trying to install to your windows partition, that won't work.

You need free space on the drive which implies shrinking your existing
partition.

[Bejoy Thomas]

Hi Lee,

One option to have a FreeBSD system on winxp, without any partitioning to the existing hard disk, is to have freebsd as a vm on virtualbox. For having a dual boot system you would need to partition the existing disk . If you have a second had disk you could select it and let FreeBSD partition it with the default configuration using "Entire Disk" . The FreeBSD handbook should help you

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/bsdinstall-partitioning.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/install.html#windows-coexist

Bejoy Thomas

[leeolives...@surewest.net]

Good afternoon, FreeBSD enthusiasts. I am attempting to install FreeBSD 9.1 on a dual-boot configuration with Windows XP. I am using bsdinstall. I do not wish for the partition table to be changed. How do I instruct bsdinstall to skip the re-partitioning step? It gives an error message that it cannot write a certain file because the medium is write-only. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Yours truly, Newby Lee

I forgot to mention some additional facts: The FreeBSD operating system is being installed from a d.v.d. I partitioned the hard drive into two equal partitions before re-installing Windows XP. Also, the following cryptic instruction was given to me by the bsdinstall program: "When finished, mount the system at /mnt and place an fstab file for the new system at tmp/bsdinstall_etc/fstab. Then type "exit". Please, can anyone explain to me what this instruction is telling me to do, and give me some details as to how to perform these tasks? Perhaps, also explain to me why I am supposed to do these things? How do I mount the system at /mnt? How do I compose an fstab file? How do I place the fstab file at tmp/bsdinstall_etc/fstab, a directory that does not exist until the filesystem is built? If the answers to any of these questions are explained in writing anywhere, please tell me where to look. Thank you. Again, yours truly, Newby Lee

[Ben Cottrell]

Lee,

Are you using DOS-style or GPT partitions? I'm assuming DOS-style,
and the rest of this email is only correct if that's the case, so
correct me if I'm wrong.

There's actually two partition tables at work here -- the "big" one,
that lives at the start of the physical disk and divides up the
FreeBSD from the Windows.

Inside the FreeBSD "slice" (slice, partition, same thing, but just
to be clear, call it a slice) there's going to be *another* partition
table, to divide up the FreeBSD partitions amongst themselves. At a
bare minimum you're going to have two partitions (which are really
sub-partitions at this point), root and swap. Maybe even more.

So it seems to me like, if you can get to the point where the
FreeBSD installer recognizes the slice you've set aside for it, as
its own, then you can let it rewrite the partition table *inside
that slice* as much as it wants to. OK? Make sense?

You just don't want it to touch the *outer* one.

I honestly don't know enough about how the boot blocks work to
know if that's going to work, in the end. You might still end up
having to say yes to let it install FreeBSD boot blocks -- I don't
know.

But it seems to me like a prerequisite, in any case, is going to
be to set the FreeBSD partition to partition type 165, so that
the installer will recognize it as a FreeBSD slice. Is it already
partition type 165? If not, can you make it type 165 and see if
that changes anything?

~Ben

[leeolives...@surewest.net]

Good evening, Free BSD enthusiasts. Thank you to each of the several people who have responded to my previous messages. I have made significant progress, but am now flummoxed at the installation of the boot loader. The handbook says to run this command, "boot0cfg -B ad0". When I run this command, I get the following error message: "Unable to get providername for ad0". What is a provider name? How do I determine the provider name for ad0? How do I communicate that information to boot0cfg? I know that this problem has something to do with the "geom" command, but the "man geom" goes on for many pages. While I think the answer may be in there somewhere, I could not find it. Any and all comments will be appreciated. Sincerely, Newby Lee

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

On Fri, 15 Mar 2013 20:11:24 -0700 (PDT)
<leeolives...@surewest.net> wrote:

> Good evening, Free BSD enthusiasts. Thank you to each of the several

good morning,

> people who have responded to my previous messages. I have made
> significant progress, but am now flummoxed at the installation of the

this is good to hear.

> boot loader. The handbook says to run this command, "boot0cfg -B
> ad0". When I run this command, I get the following error message:
> "Unable to get providername for ad0". What is a provider name? How
> do I determine the provider name for ad0? How do I communicate that
> information to boot0cfg? I know that this problem has something to
> do with the "geom" command, but the "man geom" goes on for many
> pages. While I think the answer may be in there somewhere, I could
> not find it. Any and all comments will be appreciated. Sincerely,
> Newby Lee

ad0? This sounds like that it would overwrite the loader from your
Windows installation.

Did you read man gpart?

gpart should be able to show you the current layout of the disk. It is
also able to install the boot code you need.

If I remember, you want to have Windows and FreeBSD on the same disk.
So, you should have some kind of boot manager which will give you the
choice between them. Of course, you can use whatever boot manager you
want. The one which comes with FreeBSD is a bit simple but does its job.

Erich

[Warren Block]

On Fri, 15 Mar 2013, leeolives...@surewest.net wrote:

> Good evening, Free BSD enthusiasts. Thank you to each of the several
> people who have responded to my previous messages. I have made
> significant progress, but am now flummoxed at the installation of the
> boot loader. The handbook says to run this command, "boot0cfg -B
> ad0". When I run this command, I get the following error message:
> "Unable to get providername for ad0".

This message means there is no disk called ad0. On FreeBSD 9.x, it is
likely to be called ada0 instead.

I can't find that command in the Handbook. Could you please point out
where it is?