Dual-Boot Ubuntu and PC-BSD - Part 1: Pre Installation

As I installed Ubuntu  10.04 LTS prior to my decision to do a dual-boot with PC-BSD 8.0 setup, I needed to make changes to the hard disk partition. So I decided to edit the partitions using GParted. According to the site:

"The GParted application is a graphical partition editor for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions.

A disk device can be subdivided into one or more partitions. The GParted application enables you to change the partition organization on a disk device while preserving the contents of the partitions."

On the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation, I did an install of GParted.

$sudo apt-get install gparted

After the installation of GParted, I ran into some problems.

1. I tried to unmount the partition which I intended to use for the PC-BSD installation only to find out that it cannot be unmounted. But a quick Google search gave me the solution to use GParted in the Ubuntu Live CD. So I did that and was able to edit partitions.
2. As happy as I was in being able to re-partition my hard disk for the dual-boot, when I ran the the PC-BSD installation, I couldn't find the new partition I created. Another quick Google search and found out that PC-BSD will only install on a Primary partition. Since the whole disk was used by Ubuntu, then the partition I created was an Extended partition.

The only thing I did so I can progress with the installation was to reformat the whole hard disk, create 2 Primary partitions, then proceed to install Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on the first partition and PC-BSD 8.0 on the second partition.

Now the partition table looks like this:

I will be installing the 2 OSes now so I will cut the post short here. But the lesson I learned from all this is that one should plan ahead on what one wants to do to avoid any wasted time. In this case, I had to re-install Ubuntu just so I can install PC-BSD because of the partitions I created. Another lesson is to read some documentation for the systems intended to be installed.

But all is good, now on to the installation.