installing DFly over third partition

[Alex Burke]

Hi,

Reading this thread, I just wanted to add a couple of things for
anyone wishing to install DragonFlyBSD on a system that already has an
OS installed covering the whoe disk. For me, that was an HP laptop I
got that had windows XP on it in a slice (the term used for a DOS
users' partition in BSD) covering the whole disk.

I wanted to create a second slice for BSD, which meant resizing the
slice and creating
another one next to it. I tried a couple of approches:

1) I booted a tiny linux install with some ntfs resizing tools, and
everything looked like it went well. When I rebooted however, it
turned out that i had shrunk the file system but NOT the actualy slice
size. SCARY, but thats the reality - a filesystem sits inside a slice.

2)  Having reversed the above, i downloaded the the first CD of
Mandriva linux and used their disk partitioner. It is the same NTFS
resizing tool, but its all graphical (especially good for less
experienced users), and it integrates resizing the filesystem *AND*
the slice.

The only thing I made sure of was to keep the windows slice at the
beginning of the disk to avoid stupid issues with it. The BSD gets a
<disk>s2 to install on - I went on to disklabel it and install as
usual. And I guess if you're going down this path, make sure you have
enough free space to do the resize (somehow i dont trust those command
line tools actually checking that...i'm sure they do but its better to
BE CAREFUL!). Lastly, use that graphical installer to set the new
partition to the FreeBSD (and DragonFlyBSD through inheritance) slice
id (165 IIRC). It makes it easier to see the correct place install
DFly once in the BSD installer.

I also used the BSD bootloader, and it shows up as I boot the laptop
allowing me to choose  either windows or DFly.

I would like to see something like a resizer integrated with the BSD
installer, but I agree that its so dangerous. Backup tools would be a
great thing to have alongside something like that, but I must say that
all through the resizing and installation to the second slice I was
crossing my fingers. Its knowing that any little mistake on your part
can easily trash the other OS(es) and more importantly your data on
the disk.

Now I just need to figure out why DFly hangs on boot if my atheros
cardbus card is inserted.....but thats for another thread :-)

Thanks, Alex J Burke.