Hard Drive Partitioning

[Curtrey]

I have followed the instructions in the PCBSD manual for dual booting of operating systems.
I made three partitions using a Easyus tool. Two primary and one logical. Installed Windows XP OK into its own partition. Installed PCBSD into its own partition. However the installation process of PCBSD complete obliterated the logical partition and PCBSD spread itself fover that portion of the hard drive not occupied by WindowsXP.
The partitioning tool would not resize the PCBSD partition and I have not found one which could.
What has gone wrong?

By the way the bootloader recommended in the manual will only work with the bootloader from Vista not XP. It is explained somewhere on the net but I can't remember where.

Curtrey

[Ralph_Ellis]

PC-BSD recognizes primary partitions better. You should start with 3 primary partitions and PC-BSD should not take over the 3rd partition.

[Curtrey]

Thank you for your help. I have now installed PCBSD. Having a bit of a problem finding out how to use the facilities provided. Anyway must continue and master the system.

Richard Currey

[sharris]

Something like that happened to me once now that I think about it. I created 3 primary and 1 extend partition using "PARTITION COMMANDER". I created them like this:

Primary-1 : FreeBSD 8.1
Extended :
Primary-2 : FreeBSD 8.0
Primary-3 : PcBSD


Whenever you install a Extended Partition it is always called D:/ for Windows (if you use only one primary for Windows installation). Other than that it is named by the MBR as something like Partition-5 (always 5), so by right it should have been created last by me for sanity. heehee

I installed PcBSD on Primary-3. The first time it did not work. I tried again and it worked. Now I got all three BSD's installed on a single HDD.

I inspect everything I do. I reboot using "PARTITION COMMANDER" CD to check my disk and I notice inside my EXTENDED-PARTITION it had about 15-MB worth of free Space. "I did not do that when I created the partitions. All space was used.""

I finally got hip, because I notice this kind of thing before in the pass when installing PcBSD but I thought I accidently created the free-space doing partitioning, so I let it ride. Anyway, this is what I did:

I took it to the top once again ... I use "PARTITION COMMANDER" to format the entire drive, but this time I created my partitions like this to kill the numbering problem for my head:

Primary-1 : FreeBSD 8.1
Primary-2 : FreeBSD 8.0
Primary-3 : PcBSD
Extended :

Notice the Extend-Partition was the last to be created this time, and when I formatted the Extended-Partition I left 200MB worth of FREE-SPACE at the end of that partition "just in case".

Than I re-install everything only once. I re-checked the partitions and everything was perfect. It took a long time to learn all of this because, all I did, all year, was to re-install once or the other when I screwed up playing with all 3 BSD's. Now that I have order I never have to re-formats the entire HDD.

It only make since for one to conclude that PcBSD use/need FREE-SPACE at the end of the HDD during installation. And it is not there ... he make some.

Other than that maybe I had a bug. Whatever the case, every since, I always leave Free-Space at the end of all my HDD doing partitioning. I never give the who drive to an single OS to do things for me. Hope this give you some added ideas.

[sharris]

Yes ... This got to be the case!!!

On most drive some programs figure no one on earth has a completely filled disk and may use some space at the end of that drive for the installation process. It kind of make since to me. This way it can perform a tight installation to avoid excessive defragmetation.

Maybe some programs know how to fix that during the installation process which leave no traces. But depending on your type HDD set-up which may be an unknown standard, this could be an issue for such type installation. This is because of Windows. Now we all code for commonly used partition set-up's.

I'm back to say this again because I notice the exact same thing with a program I once installed years ago. Just like this year I let it ride because I thought it was my imagination.

What ever the case, I say to you, it is wise to save a little free-space at the end of your HDD since we are not the average type user. I seen 15MB free-space created "not by me" on my hard drive. Depending on size of your HDD I would give 200MB - 1GB to free-space at the end of HDD, forever, just in case. It cost you nothing.

This only is my guest based on my experence.