4 Special Considerations

Most operating systems are very picky about where and how they are placed on the hard disk. Windows® 95 and DOS need to be on the first primary partition on the first hard disk. OS/2® is the exception. It can be installed on the first or second disk in a primary or extended partition. If you are not sure, keep the beginning of the bootable partitions below the 1024th cylinder.

If you install Windows 95 on an existing BSD system, it will “destroy” the MBR, and you will have to reinstall your previous boot manager. Boot Easy can be reinstalled by using the BOOTINST.EXE utility included in the \TOOLS directory on the CDROM, and via ftp. You can also re-start the installation process and go to the partition editor. From there, mark the FreeBSD partition as bootable, select Boot Manager, and then type W to (W)rite out the information to the MBR. You can now reboot, and Boot Easy should then recognize Windows 95 as DOS.

Please keep in mind that OS/2 can read FAT and HPFS partitions, but not FFS (FreeBSD) or EXT2 (Linux) partitions. Likewise, Windows 95 can only read and write to FAT and FAT32 (see Section 2) partitions. FreeBSD can read most filesystems, but currently cannot read HPFS partitions. Linux can read HPFS partitions, but can not write to them. Recent versions of the Linux kernel (2.x) can read and write to Windows 95 VFAT partitions (VFAT is what gives Windows 95 long file names - it is pretty much the same as FAT). Linux can read and write to most filesystems. Got that? I hope so.