Running 10 and 14 as a dual boot - help with partitioning?

[kevin324]

Hi I have FreeBSD 10 currently running, taking up the complete, single hard drive and want to install 14, but be able to revert back to 10 (in case I run into issues building my LAMP web server).

I thought it would be a simple matter to partition the drive (about 30% for v10 and 70% for V14) so initially tried booting off a GParted DVD, but it would not allow me to reduce the size of the existing partition.

Reading the install instructions, https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/bsdinstall/, section 2.6.2. Guided Partitioning Using UFS seems to suggest this will do what I want? Will it, and if so how will I be able to choose between 10 and 14 at boot up?

Here is my system info from V10:

kevin@dev% geom disk list
Geom name: cd0
Providers:
1. Name: cd0
   Mediasize: 0 (0B)
   Sectorsize: 2048
   Mode: r0w0e0
   descr: PLDS DVD+-RW DH-16AES
   ident: 1
   fwsectors: 0
   fwheads: 0

Geom name: ada0
Providers:
1. Name: ada0
   Mediasize: 1000204886016 (932G)
   Sectorsize: 512
   Mode: r2w2e3
   descr: ST1000NM0033-9ZM173
   lunid: 5000c50087470495
   ident: Z1W4M8JY
   fwsectors: 63
   fwheads: 16

root@dev% fdisk
******* Working on device /dev/ada0 *******
parameters extracted from in-core disklabel are:
cylinders=1938021 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Figures below won't work with BIOS for partitions not in cyl 1
parameters to be used for BIOS calculations are:
cylinders=1938021 heads=16 sectors/track=63 (1008 blks/cyl)

Media sector size is 512
Warning: BIOS sector numbering starts with sector 1
Information from DOS bootblock is:
The data for partition 1 is:
sysid 238 (0xee),(EFI GPT)
    start 1, size 1953525167 (953869 Meg), flag 0
        beg: cyl 0/ head 0/ sector 2;
        end: cyl 1023/ head 255/ sector 63
The data for partition 2 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 3 is:
<UNUSED>
The data for partition 4 is:
<UNUSED>

root@dev% df -h
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ada0p2    899G    130G    697G    16%    /
devfs          1.0K    1.0K      0B   100%    /dev
root@dev%

Thanks

 

[SirDice]

Stop using fdisk(8), it only understands the MBR scheme. The disk is partitioned with GPT. Post the output of gpart show ada0

If it's using ZFS (that was possible in 10), then you may be able to leverage bectl(8), although you might need to move some things around. With boot environments (BE), you can technically boot different versions of FreeBSD from the same filesystem. Just don't upgrade the ZFS pool on 14 or else 10 won't be able to boot from it anymore.