BSD HDD choice

I am trying to set up FreeBSD on the following system.

P4 2.4C
Asus P4C800 E-DELUXE
OCZ PC-4200
ATI Radeon 9600XT
Liteon SOHW-832S
Antec TruePower 550watt
WD RAPTOR 2X36.6 (RAID-0)
Seagate Ultra 200GB PATA
40GB WD HDD

when I get to Fdisk i have many options which can be seen here


I have 2 36Gb Raptor drives in raid 0 on the Ich5R chipset through SATA. I then have the 200Gb sata drive as the master and the 40GB WD drive as the slave in my primary IDE controller, then hen 2 dvd drives on the 2nd ide controller.

I do have alot of drives and want to install FreeBSD to the 40GB western Digital drive, which is in the slave position on the primary ide controller. I want to use the entire drive for free bsd, but then still be able to dual boot into win xp which is on my raid 0 configuration.

which drive shown in the picture is the 40GB WD drive, and can I dual boot with the raid 0. if possible can you load the boot record onto a floppy and then whenever that floppy is incerted, it will just boot to bsd, and when its not it will go to windows.


I am now choosing BSD due to the endless problems with linux and ich5R controllers.

I'm a FreeBSD n00b myself. The documentation indicates you can install on a secondary drive but the boot loader will have to be on the primary boot drive. GRUB would work as a chain loader but I can't tell you how to set it up right now. Maybe the GRUB site has the intructions. Here's something I found that might help. This guy managed 100 operating systems on a large multi disk array using GRUB.
http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=143973

While it's booting, it will identify which devices are detected, and what identifier they are assigned to. You can pause the scrolling by punching the scroll lock button, and then use page up/down and and the up and down keys to scroll back and forth.

If you unplug your other drives during the install, it'll make it a lot easier to figure out what the real devices are. Since they are also different sizes, you can also figure it out that way.

If I had to guess, based on what you told me, it's probably:
ad4 - 36 gig raptor
ad5 - 36 gig raptor
ar0 - the 72gig raid 0 virtual drive
ad8 - 200gb
ad10 - 40gb
de0 - ???

You need to do some thinking before you install a multi-boot system... Do you already have an OS installed? What OSes are you going to install? What bootloader do you want to use to boot everything?

Mine will be fairly simple; w2k, xp, gentoo & freebsd all on one Raptor. I don't see the point of any other OSes on my Xeon duallie. I thought about Debian but Gentoo looks like more fun.

I can put a pile of those older OSes on my PII 333 machine.