From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Aug 22 11:34:19 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id LAA08897 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 22 Aug 1995 11:34:19 -0700 Received: from cs.weber.edu (cs.weber.edu [137.190.16.16]) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with SMTP id LAA08891 for ; Tue, 22 Aug 1995 11:34:18 -0700 Received: by cs.weber.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1.1) id AA01041; Tue, 22 Aug 95 12:32:39 MDT From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Message-Id: <9508221832.AA01041@cs.weber.edu> Subject: Re: Using space in a DOS filesystem To: bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 95 12:32:38 MDT Cc: bde@zeta.org.au, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199508220729.RAA28551@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from "Bruce Evans" at Aug 22, 95 05:29:12 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4dev PL52] Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > >Hmm. I'd have hoped that the partition table could be patched after it > >was read by the kernel, to avoid having to rewrite the MBR every time > >you booted. (Or at least checking and stuffing the bogus slice back > >in if something 'smart' had tried to remove it.) > > It would be relatively easy to check the partition once you have located > it. You might be able to boot from the DOS file system, run some > utilities, mount an mfs root and create vn devices on it, mount the vn > file, and chroot() to a nicer file system. I don't want the utilities > for this in the kernel. Why not just modify a DOS runnable boot program to know how to look there? The problem is that the partition offset would have to be passed to the kernel, or some of the other changes we've been talking about done to the kernel device code, plus an additional intermediate driver to find the slab as a logical physical device. Adding that to the default kernel would probably not be worth it unless you were very clever about implementation, but for a "testdrive" kernel it would be no big deal. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.