[nycbug-talk] Dual boot IBM thinkpad T40?

[Josh Rivel]

Josh-

Joshua S. Freeman wrote...
> I recently acquired a spanking brand new T40.  It has XP Pro preinstalled.
> I'm seriously considering setting it up either as a dual boot XP Pro/FreeBSD
> laptop or simply FreeBSD...
> I've never attempted either one of these tasks before.  Any advice,
> recommendations, etc. from this crowd?

Pretty straightforward, but you might want to get the system recovery
CD from IBM before you try it, just in case you need to re-install
(They should send it to you for free if you call them up and provide
the serial # of your laptop)

There are quite a few products that will resize your Windows XP partition
for you, some free, some are not.  Partition Magic works, as does
ntfsresize which comes with several Linux Live CDs, i.e. knoppix, etc.

Basically first you shrink the NTFS partition, then boot FreeBSD
or whatever OS and install it into the unused partition. Check with your
OS docs as some may need to be in the first X gb of the hard drive.,
or below cylinder 1024.  

Once the new OS is installed, you'll need to install a boot manager.
One that I've used for years is called GAG and can be downloaded
at http://gag.sourceforge.net/  I think that FreeBSD installs it's
own bootloader (Been a while since I've installed FreeBSD) in which
case you don't need an additional bootloader.

Remember, you can also just google for "dual boot windows freebsd"
or something and probably find more hits than you need.

--
josh