[cranky]

Hi, i'm new to free BSD, I'm having a 40 GB HDD, with triple boot, windows XP on my primary partition and Slackware & ubuntu on one of the logical partitons.
Now, I want to replace ubuntu with BSD.

Is it possible to install Free BSD (release 6.2) on one of my logical partiton? since the fdisk is not showing partiton where linux is installed, im also really confused because it shows the size in starting and ending blocks.... any simpler way to go about partitoning?

I have 10GB as my primary partiton(windows) & remaining 30 gigs on extended partiton.

[anomie]

Originally Posted by cranky

Is it possible to install Free BSD (release 6.2) on one of my logical partiton?

The answer is here.

Pre-installation Tasks

I'll quote one section for you, but it is important that you read the whole thing:

A PC disk can be divided into discrete chunks. These chunks are called partitions. Since FreeBSD internally also has partitions, the naming can become confusing very quickly, therefore these disk chunks are referred to as disk slices or simply slices in FreeBSD itself. For example, the FreeBSD utility fdisk which operates on the PC disk partitions, refers to slices instead of partitions. By design, the PC only supports four partitions per disk. These partitions are called primary partitions. To work around this limitation and allow more than four partitions, a new partition type was created, the extended partition. A disk may contain only one extended partition. Special partitions, called logical partitions, can be created inside this extended partition.

...

FreeBSD must be installed into a primary partition. FreeBSD can keep all its data, including any files that you create, on this one partition. However, if you have multiple disks, then you can create a FreeBSD partition on all, or some, of them. When you install FreeBSD, you must have one partition available. This might be a blank partition that you have prepared, or it might be an existing partition that contains data that you no longer care about.

[cranky]

Thanx for the reply anomie, I had gone through this handbook, but was somewhat confused after reading an example it had, mentioning dual boot (windows & bsd), I haven't done any major changes in partitoning so far, so I have some doubts regarding this....

>Now, out of 10 GB on primary partition (windows C: ), only about 1gb is free. So i need more space on my primary partiton, how to go about it, can i free up part of my extended partiton (the ubuntu part) and extend my primary partiton, is this possible with partiton magic/g parted ( I haven't used these before)

>Or should i format the whole disk and start from scratch?
plz suggest

[anomie]

It's up to you how you want to proceed.

This is how I understand your disk layout now:

• Primary partition #1 : contains Windows XP
• Extended partition : contains two logical partitions, which each contain an OS

Is that true?

If so, get gparted so you can do some work on your partitions. * (gparted supports growing/shrinking both ext2/3 and ntfs partitions).

You could reclaim some space for FreeBSD by shrinking the ntfs partition. Or you could delete one of the logical partitions and (I think) reclaim that space for a new primary partition.

* If you care about your data, back it up before you start any of this.

[cranky]

Thanx, I used partition magic to create a primary partiton, now BSD works just fine