*BSD News Article 2670


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From: lidl@rodan.UU.NET (Kurt J. Lidl)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Removing 386BSD from the hard disk
Keywords: 386BSD
Message-ID: <154b5sINNo47@rodan.UU.NET>
Date: 28 Jul 92 20:37:16 GMT
References: <1992Jul21.152225.2082@lgc.com> <wutcd.712344627@hrz.tu-chemnitz.de>
Organization: AlterNet -- Falls Church, Virginia, USA
Lines: 32
NNTP-Posting-Host: rodan.uu.net


 wutcd@hrz.tu-chemnitz.de (Joerg Wunsch) writes:
>Kwan-Seng Law advised to low-level format the disk. If you don't want to
>do this (on an IDE, about 10 % of IDE drives are problematically with this),
>write a simple DOS program which nullifies all sectors of the first tracks
>(via BIOS hard disk interrupt); i'm sure this will help, at least when done
>on the whole disk.

And under 386bsd, you would use "dd".

As in: "dd if=/386bsd of=/dev/rwd0c obs=8192 count=1" %%

That ought to pretty much blow away the first track or so...

Much simpler than having to go in and actually *touch* code that
mucks about with BIOS calls.

(I did that once.  A screaming nightmare inside of DEBUG that I
shall remember for a long time, representing most, if not all
the things that I really, really, really, dislike about doing
*anything under DOS!)

-Kurt

%% if you have something other than the start of the hard disk at
the beginning of the c partition (like you are running with dos
co-existing on the same hard drive), this will not work for you, I
think.
-- 
/* Kurt J. Lidl (lidl@uunet.uu.net)   | Unix is the answer, but only if you */
/*                                    | phrase the question very carefully. */
/* Don't even think of confusing my opinions with my employer's opinions!   */