Warning about installing DragonFly and FreeBSD to same disk

[Chris Pressey]

On Fri, 26 Aug 2005 10:10:14 +0300
Eugene <communique at xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Chris Pressey wrote:
> 
> >Because DragonFly and FreeBSD have the same partition id (165,)
> >FreeBSD's installer will see the DragonFly partition as a FreeBSD
> >slice. And, *even if you don't set up any BSD partitions on the
> >DragonFly partition*, the installer will erase the DragonFly
> >partition's disklabel.
> >
> >  
> >
> Could You tell, what was the version of FreeBSD, which caused such a 
> problem, and if this problem occur rather often or always for that 
> version? 

This was a FreeBSD 6.0-CURRENT snapshot from July.  I've only tried it
once, and it happened once, so you could say it happens 100% of the time
:)

I did try the workaround, successfully - I set the "type" of my
DragonFly partition to "17" (chosen randomly) in FreeBSD's partition
editor, before installing FreeBSD on the other partition, and FreeBSD
didn't touch it.

> The fact is that I've installed FreeBSD 4.9 on a drive with DragonFly 
> 1.2 and boot them with DragonFly bootloader with no extra
> manipulations.

That's not too surprising, I don't think; 4.9 is similar enough to
DragonFly that it probably recognizes and preserves the disklabel while
installing.

I really can't say why booting (which, I should be clear, is a
*different* problem from what I was describing) fails to work smoothly.
It fails to work smoothly for me, even just booting two DragonFly
partitions - I have to manually enter "ufs:ad2s1a" or "ufs:ad2s2a" at
the "mountroot" prompt.  But I assumed that was because I'm using the
NetBSD bootloader, which apparently doesn't communicate "which partition
we were booted from" to the subsequent boot stages.

-Chris