From owner-freebsd-bugs Thu Feb 22 07:00:59 1996 Return-Path: owner-bugs Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id HAA23308 for bugs-outgoing; Thu, 22 Feb 1996 07:00:59 -0800 (PST) Received: from labinfo.iet.unipi.it (labinfo.iet.unipi.it [131.114.9.5]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id HAA23302 for ; Thu, 22 Feb 1996 07:00:47 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (luigi@localhost) by labinfo.iet.unipi.it (8.6.5/8.6.5) id PAA21276 for bugs@freebsd.org; Thu, 22 Feb 1996 15:57:32 +0100 From: Luigi Rizzo Message-Id: <199602221457.PAA21276@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Subject: msdos brokennes and related subjects To: bugs@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 22 Feb 1996 15:57:32 +0100 (MET) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-bugs@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk I am trying to work on the MSDOS partition on 2.1R. I have tried with both mtools and the msdosfs. MTOOLS: ------- mtools does not support C: anymore (it used to in 1.1.5). I patched my 2.1R port of mtools with 1.1.5 patches, and it seems to work perfectly (it does not use any system call, just reads the partition table). If there is interest, I'd like to submit a patch to allow the support of non-removable media. MSDOSFS: -------- As it has been said many times, msdosfs is known to be broken there, and I have never been so brave to try this on my own machine... Eventually I decide to set up a sacrificial system with two disks, one pure FreeBSD, another pure MSDOS. I successfully mounted the msdos partition, wrote some 40MB (a whole Windows95 tree, except IO.SYS MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM) on it, and the system was shut down cleanly. Trying to reboot from the msdos system (it was bootabl), surprise surprise, I got Invalid partition table although booting from a floppy allowed me to see everything on the disk. A subsequent FDISK /MBR did not help, still got the same message. Is it possible that the MSDOSFS tries to access/modify the partition table, even though it is not anymore part of the DOS slice ? Luigi ==================================================================== Luigi Rizzo Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione email: luigi@iet.unipi.it Universita' di Pisa tel: +39-50-568533 via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) fax: +39-50-568522 http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ ====================================================================