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Hello,
I have an old 6.4 GB HDD that is divided into three equal FAT partitions. I would like to install FreeBSD on the third partition; I already have Windows 98 SE installed on the first partition and I would like to keep it. Will I be able to install FreeBSD on the third partition, leaving the first two for Windows? Will FreeBSD setup convert automatically this FAT partition into a FreeBSD compatible partition or will I have to delete or edit this partition with some utility before trying to install FreeBSD?
Please help me, I am completly new to that field since I have never experienced the installation of anything other than Windows.
Thank you for your help.

Yes.

If you give freebsd the bios partition (what freebsd calls a "slice") during the install phase, it will wipe it out and create it's own partitions inside of that slice, formatting them with ufs2/ffs. As long as the partition is big enough (2g should be plenty), you should not have any problems, other than the 'partition' being completely opaque to windows (i.e. you will not be able to access files on the fbsd slice while running windows). Just make sure you specify the correct slice when installing freebsd, or you could wipe out one of the other two... As with any major hd activity, be sure to back up your 'critical' data to cd's or another machine

(hope this helps some)

Hello,
So I will tell the setup to use the third FAT partition for the installation; it will wipe it and place there a 2 GB slice with a 2 GB partition inside of it, right? By the way, how are partitions useful when the HDD can already be divided into slices? Why make another sub-division (partition) within one slice?
Also, may there be some problems/conflicts with the FreeBSD slice during a Windows scandisk or defrag?
And finally, is there under FreeBSD some checks I have to do frequently like the scandisk or defrag under Windows?

So I will tell the setup to use the third FAT partition for the installation; it will wipe it and place there a 2 GB slice with a 2 GB partition inside of it, right? By the way, how are partitions useful when the HDD can already be divided into slices? Why make another sub-division (partition) within one slice?

PC BIOS is limited to seeing 4 partitions natively (where extended partitions are 'partitions in partitions' as a dos hack), as far as I understand. The slice/partition is a similar hack (dating back to the i386 patchset for bsd44 I think?) to avoid overrunning the primary partition limit *shrug*

Also, may there be some problems/conflicts with the FreeBSD slice during a Windows scandisk or defrag?

No, windows will see the fbsd partition as an "unknown disk", and shouldn't touch it at all.

And finally, is there under FreeBSD some checks I have to do frequently like the scandisk or defrag under Windows?

No, *nix fs's are careful about disk integrity and contiguousness... If the machine goes down without unmounting the partitions (power outage, etc), then it will try to run 'fsck' on boot, possibly in the background...