Hi,
I have a workstation with two factory installed hard disks. The first disk,
ada0, is occupied by a Windows 7 Pro OS (mainly kept for the three year
warranty of the workstation as Dell techs mostly speak the Microsoft
language).
Instead I have configured the BIOS to boot from the MBR on the second disk
as I most of the time (99%) use FreeBSD. The MBR on ada1 was installed with
sysinstall's option "Install the FreeBSD Boot Manager", when I installed
the FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE.
(The latest BIOS version 2.4.0 for Dell T1500 does not support
UEFI/GPT/GUID.)
The second disk ada1, now has three FreeBSD slices:
1) ada1s1 with FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE
2) ada1s2 with FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE
3) ada1s3 with FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE
I want to install the new FreeBSD 8.4-RELEASE on ada1s1 by overwriting the
now existing two first slices. This means that ada1s3, must become ada1s2
instead. Is this possible to do?
A very important question is if sysinstall's option "Install the FreeBSD
Boot Manager" detects that I have a FreeBSD 8.3 and detect it as slice 2 on
disk 1? So it becomes a boot option when I am rebooting? (Maybe the slice
may come up as ad6s2, because AHCI in FreeBSD 8.4 isn't enabled at the time
of the install.)
If the answer to these questions is yes, then the next two questions arise.
Can I mount ada1s2a (FreeBSD 8.3) from the newly installed FreeBSD 8.4 and
edit my FreeBSD's 8.3-R /etc/fstab according to the new disk layout, and
occasionally run FreeBSD 8.3 without problems? Or do I have to do more to
get it to work?
The idea behind this kind of 'reverse' disk layout of mine is to have
FreeBSD 8.4 as my new default OS. And have FreeBSD 8.3 untouched for
configuring FreeBSD 8.4 and booting into it when ever needed. If I can do
this as described above, I will have plenty of space on the disk for the
future and a new FreeBSD release.
Thanks for your interest in my questions,
Conny Andersson
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Conny Andersson
<atar...@telia.com>
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