*BSD News Article 11712


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From: wier@merlin.etsu.edu (Bob Wier)
Subject: Re: how do I undo 386BSD boot blocks?
Message-ID: <wier-230293204116@csci-wiermac.etsu.edu>
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Organization: East Texas State University
References: <1993Feb12.184310.27616@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov> <C2sBM6.LxM@unix.portal.com>
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 1993 03:44:40 GMT
Lines: 39

In article <C2sBM6.LxM@unix.portal.com>, mykes@shell.portal.com (mike myke
schwartz) wrote:
> 
> Kaleb Keithley (kaleb@seaview) wrote:
> : In article terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
> : > because I wrote
> : >>There are some poor assumptions about telling people to use 'fdisk /mbr'.
> : >
> : >There is an alternate method in INSTALL.NOTES.  Basically, you don't need
> : >to fdisk the mbr for a valid one to be written -- you just have to invalidate
> : >it.  This can be accomplished with either of the following:

 I'm not sure whom is flaming whom here (attributions get tough to follow
 3 levels deep).

 However, I had the bootable problem trying to reinstall MS DOS 4.0 after
 putting LINUX on my machine (have sinced switched to 386BSD).  Numerous
 people suggested fdisk /mbr but it's not present in 4.0 (latest the 
 school here had).  I finally found an anti virus program at WUARCHIVE
 MBRVIRUS (or something quite similar).  If you're working with MSDOS,
 it just has 4 different versions (corresponding to older versions of 
 MSDOS) which apparantly re-write the MBR.  Despite dire warnings
 to the contrary, I ran it on my disk and it worked just fine for 3.3,
 but gave an error message for 4.1 - however it looked like it did it's
 stuff because I can now boot MSDOS again.

 Now, a question - I note in one of the FAQs that you are supposed to
 create partitions with IDs of something like A6 and A7 (or is it A5 and
 A6) for 386BSD and swap areas.  How do you change the partition id?
 Via Disklabel? I'd like to get a larger swap space than the "normal"
 5 mb or so.

THANKS

-Bob W.

======== insert usual disclaimers here ============
  Bob Wier, East Texas State U., Commerce, Texas
  wier@merlin.etsu.edu (watch for address change)