[nycbug-talk] Dual boot IBM thinkpad T40?

Josh Rivel josh
Fri Jul 22 16:58:43 EDT 2005


Freeman, Joshua wrote...
>    but but.. I don't think you understood my question Josh.
>    The laptop came with XP Pro on it with a certain Product Key/Serial
>    Number. But.. Since I bought this with my employers $$ and my employer
>    has its own Product Key for XP Pro my thinking is first I'll format
>    the drive, then re-install OUR XP Pro, and all the other stuff we
>    install like NAV, Office, Spybot, etc...
>    THEN
>    I'll shrink the partition etc... From your email it sounds like I'd
>    have two installs of XP Pro on the drive...

No I understood you perfectly :)

Here are the steps I think you should follow.

Lets say you have a 20gb HD and you want to make two 10gb partitions,
one for XP and one for FreeBSD.

1.  Use some tool (Partition magic, Power Quest, ntfsresize, whatever)
to shrink the current XP partition to 10gb, and leave one unused 10gb
partition.

2. Take your companies Windows XP Boot CD and install a fresh version
or Windows XP with your companies tweaks and software on it onto the
first 10gb partition.  Right now you will have one 10gb partition
with Windows XP on it.  Install NAV, Office, SPybot, etc. so it's
now customized the way you want it.  To Windows it will just be a 10gb
partition, it doesn't care about the other 10gb on the disk.

3. Take your FreeBSD CD and install FreeBSD onto the second 10gb partition.
The FreeBSD bootloader should detect the existing NTFS partition being
used by Windows XP and allow you to hit F1 and boot time to get into XP,
and F2 to get into FreeBSD.

You now have two 10gb partitions, the first with your custom version
or Windows XP and the 2nd with FreeBSD whatever version.

Hope this helps.

--
josh






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