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Old 27th October 2008
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by php111 View Post
I understand with XP, we have drive C for XP, and after that other drives as well.
Each hard drive installed on a system can have a maximum of four primary MBR partitions defined. Windows requires one primary partition for its boot partition which it will typically letter C:. Note that drive letters are a convention used by Windows itself to abstract the underlying MBR partitions configured on the disk.
Quote:
Could I keep both drive C and H?
Given that you are not mentioning drives, D:, E:, F:, or G:, my guess is that you have at least one of your three remaining primary partitions configured as an extended partition. How these drive letters are distributed amongst the remaining partitions cannot be gleaned from the information provided. To determine what partitions have been used & what partitions are still available, look at the output of the fdisk command-line utility or right-click on "My Computer", select "Manage", followed by choosing "Disk Management" (if I recall Windows XP correctly...). There, you should be able to determine how the drive has been divided up. Be forewarned that you may have used all available partitions. If this is indeed the case, you will need to:
  • save all important data.
  • delete and/or reconfigure the currently configured MBR partitions in order to make one primary MBR available for OpenBSD.
Quote:
Drive C- Total size 43.9GB Free space 38.4GB
Drive H- Total size 188GB Free space 185 GB
If you are ultimately asking what is required to install OpenBSD, note that OpenBSD 4.3 (& earlier versions...) must be installed in a primary MBR partition. One of the new features coming in OpenBSD 4.4 (whose target release is 1 November 2008...) is that it will be able to be installed in either a primary or extended partition.

As for how to install OpenBSD, as has been mentioned earlier, study Section 4 for the FAQ:

http://openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html

Section 4.8 covers the specifics of multibooting, but you should take the time to familiarize yourself with all preliminary information found in Sections 4.1 - 4.7 as well. You will develop needed perspective by doing so.

Multibooting is not complicated, but mistakes made during configuration can result in data being lost. It is highly recommended that you back up all important data in all partitions before attempting to make signficant changes to either partitions used by Windows, the installation of OpenBSD, or the configuration of whatever boot manager is used afterwards.

Last edited by ocicat; 27th October 2008 at 06:07 AM.
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