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Old 3rd April 2014
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jggimi jggimi is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: USA
Posts: 7,975
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Hello, and welcome!

First, multibooting is described in FAQ 4.9. I'll quote what it states there. The italics are the OpenBSD Project's, not mine:
Quote:
It is not a trivial task! If you don't understand what you are doing, you may end up deleting large amounts of data from your computer. New OpenBSD users are strongly encouraged to start with a blank hard drive on a dedicated machine, and then practice your desired configuration on a non-production system before attempting a multiboot configuration on a production machine.
The reason I quoted this is because from your post, it appears you have never used OpenBSD before. I strongly urge you to use a second drive. It could be an externally attached USB or SATA drive - OpenBSD can be installed onto and used via a USB stick.

Also note: OpenBSD does not support UEFI boot or drives with GPT partitioning. Your system's BIOS must permit and support "legacy" MBR booting.

If your BIOS permits MBR booting, then multibooting is possible, but the boot drive must have a functional MBR, not the "pseudo MBR" stored as part of a GPT. If your system is GPT, it will need to be converted to MBR first. Microsoft states this can be done only on drives with no volumes -- which means you will need to reinstall Win7 with MBR partitioning.

Now, your system may support MBR partitioning, your system may already use MBR booting. If it does, you can follow the steps in FAQ 4.9 for reducing the size of your NTFS partition, then install OpenBSD into the free space.

OpenBSD uses MBRs for booting the first stage bootloader. It uses MBR partition tables only to define its own space on an MBR drive. OpenBSD has its own, separate partitioning system called "disklabels" which are ubiquitous across all architectures. MBRs are used on only five of those.

Last edited by jggimi; 3rd April 2014 at 09:01 PM. Reason: typo, clarity
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