Dual Booting FreeBSD and Windows

by Stephen Fluin 2007.04.28
In the past I have found that dual booting an operating system like FreeBSD and Windows can be extremely difficult. The main problem (apart from the incompatibilities of FreeBSD with some microsoft products) is that there aren't good read-write capabilities for NTFS on FreeBSD, and there are no good drivers for UFS in Windows. The compromise that I have recently tested and found to be successfull is to have a third partition on your machine that is formatted at ext2fs. Having an ext2 format means that both FreeBSD and Windows can have read-write capability on the same drive (this is possible for windows via an open-source download). The reason this is important because for day-to-day activities such as email or web browsing, it is not reasonable to have to make changes to accounts or settings in both operating systems. By having a shared filesystem it is possible for both the Windows and FreeBSD versions of programs (such as Firefox and Thunderbird) to point to a single profile.
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