Installing 9.0 Isotope on whole drive in Vista.

[Beanpole]

@cat
If you actually want to *replace* Windows with PC-BSD, that is much easier than dual-booting. For dual-booting you will end up with a working copy of Windows on one part of your drive, and PC-BSD on another part. That is why you need to worry about re-partitioning your drive and such.
If you want to have PC-BSD *only*, you simply need to boot up the PC-BSD install disk, and when it comes to the page about where to install, you just need to select "Use Whole Disk" (or something like that). That will overwrite any and all windows partitions and make the entire hard-drive one huge PC-BSD partition. Be warned though, you will lose all the data that you currently have in your windows partition if you decide to do this.

[Weixiong]

Hi, Weixiong, and thanks for welcome. You say you have installed PCBSD over Vista. Does that mean that you have got rid of Vista and installed PCBSD on whole disk. That is the solution I would prefer. Especially if it could be possible to change disk C and D to one partition. But It would be fine to install on C. Any info on how to do that would be very helpful. Isotope 9.0 DVD has arrived, and is ready for installation.

Yes, I installed to the whole disk. The restore partition that it came with in place of OS disks was hosed and it got to the point I needed to reformat and had little choice in the matter. Like Beanpole said, you just have to make the choice to use the whole disk and the build couldn't have gone smoother for me.

I can't say I miss Vista at all though. The power supply on the PC I ran PC-BSD 1.5.1 on gave out several years ago and it had been so long since I had ran a *NIX box I had forgotten most of what I knew about it but it all came back to me in no time. Isotope runs great on my laptop, I was able to install all the initial apps I wanted from AppCafe and there isn't anything I could have done on Vista I can't do now.

I've installed FreeBSD 7.4 on my other laptop since then so Windows is history for me now.

[cat]

Finally managed to install pcbsd on my Acer Aspire laptop, and thanks for all good advice. It took some time, but I learned a lot along the way. The big problem was that both my Acer laptops flatly refuses to run any CD or DVD with an OS on it, and parted magic and easy bcd did not work either, but I managed, after a lot of work, to find a way to do it. So Isotrope 9.0 is installed, booted, and everything works except my wireless connection. I can use Windows 7 on my other laptop until I have solved the problem.

[Beanpole]

Glad to hear that you got it working (at least partially)!

I have a laptop that I put PC-BSD on as well, and I discovered that some of the newer laptops actually have a special setting in the BIOS to make windows run better... but causes all sorts of problems when you try to install an alternate OS. When I turned that setting off on my laptop, it all worked perfectly. I would recommend at least taking a look at your BIOS settings to see if there is something like that enabled on your laptops as well. If I remember correctly, it was called "Windows Optimization Mode" or something like that with my laptop.

[Cowm10]

Could I ask, how do I install PC-BSD on a completely separate HDD? I didn't find this in the handbook.

Basically I have two 500 GB disks. On disk 1 Windows 7 resides, on disk 2 I would install PC-BSD dedicated. Can I tell the installer to 'use whole disk' after selecting disk 2, or would that mess things up? Where do I install the bootloader for PC-BSD?

Thank you in advance for your help

[thedaemonofid]

Just use the whole disk when you go to install. Personally I have 2 drives, 1 with Windows 7 and 1 with BSD. I use my BIOS' boot manager and select which harddrive I want to boot off of. If you don't have a bootloader and install BSD to your second disk you will just be booted into windows as normal with no way into BSD. I believe your options then would be to install a bootloader, configure windows bootloader, or use a BIOS bootloader if you have one.

[Cowm10]

Just use the whole disk when you go to install. Personally I have 2 drives, 1 with Windows 7 and 1 with BSD. I use my BIOS' boot manager and select which harddrive I want to boot off of. If you don't have a bootloader and install BSD to your second disk you will just be booted into windows as normal with no way into BSD. I believe your options then would be to install a bootloader, configure windows bootloader, or use a BIOS bootloader if you have one.

Thanks for your reply :-)

Unfortunately, that created a HUGE HUGE HUGE disaster over here, which I only managed to recover thanks to an EXTREMELY GREAT TOOL (in caps here for member friends to take notice of): testdisk (cgsecurity.org): this tool literally saved me from death(!!)

What happened?

I booted the DVD64. It showed me two disks (I have two physical disks). I selected the second disk and told it to 'use whole disk'). And what it did next was: delete the EXTENDED PARTITION OF DISK 1. The Windows 7 disk with 5 partitions including Win7 (I've got an image of that, so no sweat), but the remaining 4 partitions had all my data on it. My mails, my vids/mp3's/documents needed for work: the works. Everything gone. Of course, my last backup appeared to be from 4 weeks ago (sounds familiar to anybody?).

I can tell you, I really thanked god on my knees for the tool 'testdisk': it restored everything whereas the first tools I tried (all that commercial crap) found nothing but my Windows 7 (C:\). The 'testdisk'-tool however did a short search (5 seconds) and found the deleted partitions with all data on it, and recovered them completely to a new disk.

Key points:
1. I am currently heavily researching the Synology NAS because I don't ever again want to have this crap again --- if not for 'testdisk' I would have lost extremely important data that couldn't have been recovered anywhere.
2. PC-BSD- guys and galls, please check your installer again, because people can get heart attacks from this ...(!)
3. I won't be trying any install of PC-BSD untill I know I have a NAS in place to backup EVERYTHING before I try this game again.

Mind you, I had FreeBSD on this very same computer without these problems.

So thanks again for building PC-BSD, your efforts are HUGELY appreciated by me, but please: make sure the installer can be trusted to work

Untill later, when, after having a NAS, I hope I can enjoy the fruits of PC_BSD: which is a beautiful effort, after all and without any doubt