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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.hawaii.edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.mathworks.com!uhog.mit.edu!uw-beaver!uw-coco!nwnews.wa.com!news1.halcyon.com!coho!tzs From: tzs@coho.halcyon.com (Tim Smith) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: System Configuration / Boot Manager Date: 20 Jan 1996 21:32:53 GMT Organization: Northwest Nexus, Inc. - Professional Internet Services Lines: 35 Message-ID: <4drn25$9cl@news1.halcyon.com> References: <4de4pf$79i@news.nacm.com> <4dgps6$e7j@irk.zetnet.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: coho.halcyon.com Philip Burden <phil.burden@zetnet.co.uk> wrote: >yes,I do.But I found after setting up BSD,even when instructing the >Freebsd install routine NOT to change the master boot record,it >did,and I had to run OS/2's Fdisk to reset Boot Manager as startable. I've found that it is a good idea when using multiple operating systems to keep copies of block 0 of each hard disk, and block 0 of each partition, in a safe place, along with a DOS program that can restore these. There are too many operating systems that like to muck with things that are none of their business: (1) FreeBSD likes to muck with your boot disk, even if you are installing on another disk and explicitly told it not to install its boot manager. I believe you can stop this in the installation by selecting your boot disk and explicitly telling it to make your OS/2 Boot Manager partition active. FreeBSD appears to only muck around with the active partition on the boot drive if you have not specified yourself what partition you want to be active. (2) Windows 95 likes to make the partition it installs on the active partition. (3) I believe that both Windows 95 and Windows NT want to change sector 0 of your DOS partition, so if you have to uninstall by hand, you need to restore this. (4) Someone (I've not figured out who yet...) likes to change your partition map entries for partitions that start and/or end past cylinder 1023. There are two different conventions in use for how such partitions should look (i.e., set cylinders to 1023, or set cylinders to real number of cylinders mod 1024), and whomever is doing this appears to be normalizing that map to the form it wants, which can confuse things that expect it to be the other way. --Tim Smith