Making the move

Well, I'm getting there. Unfortunately, I'm still posting this from my WinXP boot, but progress is being made. Here's what I've done so far:

1. Cleaned up one of the 120gb hard drives, in order to turn it over entirely to PC-BSD.


2. Made a PC-BSD CDROM. Well, to be honest, I've made about about ten PC-BSD CDROMs, as I'm having problems getting one to boot without any errors. Using two different burners and two different pieces of software (BurnCDCC and Easy Media Creator), burning at a variety of speeds (from "Optimal", through 16x, 8x and down to 4x) to burn the ISO, and booting it on 4 different computers and 5 different CD drives (I found out my main machine will boot from either CD drive), I still get random CD errors while booting, which has me scared. One suggestion was to try setting the 'hw.ata.atapi_dma' to zero, but that didn't help (by selecting option 6 at boot time, and typing in:

   
   
# set hw.ata.atapi_dma=0

# boot

   

   But that didn't help either. The one I burned at 16x seemed to work the best - both fast enough (slower speeds were real drags) and with the same number of (minimal) "READ_BIG MEDIUM ERROR" reports as slower speeds. It seemed to install okay, finding my 160GB hard drive on my Promise controller card just fine.

   
   
3. I installed BootIT NG and it found both the old WinXP and the new PC-BSD boot partitions, and I can boot into either.

The boot in PCBSD worked fine, but now I have to play the usual, tiring, X Window games. I have an ATI 8500 card with dual monitors, and now I have to figure out how to get that setup to work, as both monitors show the same screen. It looks like it can be made to work, but I'm not sure how just yet. Then I have to tweak the X display to be bigger and better.

I was pleased to see that PC-BSD easily found all my WinXP partitions, which is nice. Not sure if I can write to them, as most of them are NTFS partitions. But at least reading them is nice.