*BSD News Article 17711


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!xlink.net!rz.uni-karlsruhe.de!news.uni-stuttgart.de!delos!migieger
From: migieger@delos.stgt.sub.org (Michael Giegerich)
Subject: Re: Mtools still won't access HD : -(
References: <9317917.18572@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> <summer.741309166@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1993 22:30:11 GMT
Organization: Delos Stuttgart, Germany
Message-ID: <1993Jun29.223011.23231@delos.stgt.sub.org>
Lines: 46

In article <summer.741309166@mullian.ee.Mu.OZ.AU> summer@ee.mu.OZ.AU (Mark Summerfield) writes:
[...]
>with instructions, which I followed.  I set up the entry for the hard drive
>in /etc/mtools as:
>
>C /dev/wd0d 16 0 0 0

I had to add the sectors of the 1st track (36) of my hd as offset
(makes sense: 1st sector of 1st track contains among others
the partition table -for DOS- and the rest for example julians
bootblocks. Anyway the first track normally is allways reserved
(if the hd is used with DOS?)).

Something interesting:
I'm using a IDE drive as startup-drive for 386bsd. Other partitions
on the drive are: primary DOS, OS/2, extended DOS.
With the procedure just described I access the primary DOS partition
as `C:'. The extendend DOS partition (separated by OS/2 from the pri-
mary) starts at a given offset + another time one reserved track (36
sectors)!!!

BTW both partitions could be accessed w/o problems :-)

>(my DOS partition is first on the disk, so the whole disk partition, without
>an offset should be OK, right?)  The zeros are as per the README file.  Now
>I get "Probable non-DOS partition" errors when I try to access c: drive.
>Looking at the source (init.c) it looks like this is an inevitable
>consequence of having the geometry fields set to zero, but that's what
>the instructions say to do!  I'm not game to make up a work-around, the
>possible consequences are too horrible to contemplate!

Yes.
But if you install 386bsd (w/ mtools and pcfs) you ought to have
a strong constitution anyway (at least at the moment when you
reboot and wait and wait and wait and *nothing* happens - and
suddenly remember you never backed up your hd :-)

Bye,
Michael



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Michael Giegerich             | migieger@delos.stgt.sub.org
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