*BSD News Article 53135


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From: obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu (David E. O'Brien)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Windows NT and FreeBSD
Date: 16 Oct 1995 17:44:06 GMT
Organization: University of California, Davis
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Message-ID: <45u5l6$73b@mark.ucdavis.edu>
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Barry Scott (tsbarry@bnr.ca) wrote:
: Steve Moubray (smoubray@dcc.com) wrote:
: : I need to run MS-DOS, Windows NT and FreeBSD on one 4G SCSI drive.
: : What is the easiest way to get FreeBSD and Windows NT to co-exist?  I
: : installed FreeBSD after Windows NT and even though I selected to leave
: : the boot record intact, FreeBSD ate it up and I could no longer run
: : NT.  Luckily I made a backup.
: 
: BTEASY has a problem with Windows NT. It uses a few bytes too many
: of the MBR. I am developing patches - mail me for an updated BTEASY.
: The symptoms are that Windows NT will report that there no signature
: on the disk and ask you for permission to write the signature. That
: write will remove BTEASY. Further if you have changed the driver
: letter of you Windows NT boot partition that driver letter assignment
: will be lost.

Same thing happens with the OS/2 boot manager.  If you install OS/2 first
and then MS-NT the same exact thing will happen.  It seems Microsoft uses
these two bytes in the MBR that nobody has before.  So others didn't bother
to preserve them, often writing trash into them.  Well NT just don't like
that.  :-))

-- David    (obrien@cs.ucdavis.edu)