[minesh]

Hi All,

I am very new to UNIX. for the past few years i have been stuck with winDoze. i have been trying to install FreeBSD 5.4 without success.

i have two maxtor 40GB disks. the first one has one active primary partition of approx 20GB on which i installed windows2000 and the rest of the disk is filled with NTFS format data.
on the second disk i have a 20 gb primary partition(NTFS) and the rest of it is unused. i am using this to install unix.

1. i am booting from a CD ROM. i get a disk geometry warning. but i proceed ahead, make a standard installation. i make a new slice of 10 GB and set this active. i use the FreeBSD bootManager so that i can have dual OS on my pc. the installation completes successfully and then when i reboots...the system starts with windows 2000 again.
i don't get any option to select win2k or freeBSD.

2. when i tried installing FreeBSD on another pc which has USB keyboard, the keybd doesn't work at all. in the start up screen of FreeBSD 5.4 its mentioned tp press F7 to boot with USB keyboard support. but how do i press F7 when my keyboard itself doesn't work?
i googled and found a mention of rc.conf file, but its not on my cd rom.

pardon me for my ignorance, but am i missing something here?

regards,
minesh++

[rob897]

Apparently this has come up for a few others as well including myself.
From what I read its not a big deal and installation should be fine regardless of that error.

As far as the keyboard, there is an option (#7) I think from the boot menu (if installed) to Boot FreeBSD with USB Keyboard. Maybe worth a try.

[Amicus]

With Windows + FreeBSD installs, I tell the FreeBSD installation program to leave the MBR alone and then I load GAG for a bootloader. GAG has been mentioned on SE before and is available at http://gag.sourceforge.net. It's pretty cool even if you don't have multiple OS's on one box.

As for the USB keyboard issue make sure USB support is on in your BIOS, and when plugging in the keyboard use the bottom USB header. I don't know if this will make a difference or not but I seem to recall on some boards the bottom header picks up keyboards better. I may be making all that up though... but if you can get into the BIOS with the keyboard it should work in FreeBSD.

[drtvasudevan]

well, i am very new here but have come here after a few attempts at install.
i had this same problem of not booting in multi OS environment.
apparently one has to install the boot loader in BOTH the disks.
the info is hidden somewhere in the manual.

other bootloaders seem to have some problem recognising the file type.
regards
tv