I have a Toshiba laptop with Vista on it. The HD is 160Gb. The default partitions on the drive were resized to make 50Gb free at the end of the disk for FreeBSD. The HD has now 4 partitions:

1G: Toshiba read only 40G: C: vista 60G: D: vista 50G: FreeBSD 6.2 (planed)

First attempt: I am informed that the disk geometry is incorrect: It seems that the BIOS is not giving the correct geo. The FDISK info is way off the manifacture specs. It uses instead a more "reasonnable" geo (the total in Go = 152Gb seems ok! the FDISK util takes the unused partition and I create a FreeBSD slice. I then select "Leave MBR untouched" since Vista is suppose to manage multi OS. I define the swap, / and other mount point. When done, it complain about: Chunk ad0S1 does not start on a track boundary... same for ALL other partitions of the HD...

I go on with the installation. Every thing ok. The laptop reboot and FreeBSD is working fine! But... no more Windows, no boot manager on startup. So I am left off with a FreeBSD only laptop on 1/3 of the disk!

So I guess the geometry was leathtal! I used the Toshiba Restore CDs. Because of this, I have no control over the MS Vista setup. I would normaly do a FreeBSD install with boot manager, make the slices, reserve a partition for MS and then install MS. This way, Windows uses the space left and it always worked. Now, I am stuck with vista in there first.

Second attempt: same thing (same geo warnings, same bad track boundary after a partition deletion and rebuild with BootIt NG utility) but I then used the FBSD boot manager. I did reboot with a boot manager asking for F1... but then, I had F1,F2,F3,F4 one per partition: the Toshiba, the C, The D and FBSD!!! F2 and F3 did not work, (dont recall the error message) but it was imposible to select Vista... but FreeBSD was working!

Can someone help! This seems a lost cause... Thanks -- Mark