Hello,

On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 03:36:06 -0500
"James R. Phillips" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> So - can a FreeBSD install in free space on the second drive somehow 
> damage an NTFS partition on the first drive?  Has this happened to 
> anyone else?

Well, I can't tell you for sure, but chances are pretty small in my
experience. I've been keeping no less than three operating systems on a
single hdd for quite some time no, and even four have been working in
parallel for months, with lots of reinstalls.
I actually use one primary OS (Linux, now I'm considering a migration to
FreeBSD), windows for games, and one to two OS'es to toy around with,
among these Free- (both 4.9 and 5.2), Net- (1.6.1) and OpenBSD (3.2 and
3.4). No problem whatsoever. Especially not of the kind you were facing.

So the chances of the installer killing your windows by accident are
really low, I'd say. It might have killed windows by some mistake of
yours (you sound like you know what you're doing, but nobody's
perfect...), though I don't think so, since you didn't even install
FreeBSD to the same hdd. 
Maybe, just maybe, you tried to access the ntfs-partition in
read/write-mode by accident from either Linux or FreeBSD? Write-support
for NTFS is still considered experimental, in both systems.

Otherwise I would rather suspect windows of killing itself - it looks
like too smart an action for windows to take, but it's known to do that,
sometimes. Well, 9x/ME is. But Win2k seems to very stable for a windows,
unless some worm or virus has found its way to your system... 

Maybe something with the bootloader? But you say, windows BSOD'ed you,
so you must have been past the bootloader. 

By now it's too late, but you could have compared the wrecked
NTFS-system and the backups you've made to find out what has changed.
;-/

If it was FreeBSD's fault, I think it might have been the bootloader. I
don't know how well FreeBSD boots of other hdd's than the first (Windows
simply does't, for example), maybe it tried to install its bootloader to
the first hdd before noticing that's not where FreeBSD was... 
On the other hand, that sounds strange, too. 

Kind regards,

Benjamin

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