Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:09:36 +0100 From: "deeptech71@gmail.com" <deeptech71@gmail.com> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: FreeBSD anti-competitive activities Message-ID: <3f2022cd1001131509o3b31e884m512d9faf9ac0730b@mail.gmail.com>
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Well, well. Who would have thought that the FreeBSD Team would decide to implement a hack that would block booting of any Windows-like, and possibly other non-FreeBSD based operating environments? Just as soon as FreeBSD 8.0 came out, I downloaded a boot-only disc image and went off to reinstall FreeBSD (don't ask why). OK, it worked whatsoever. But as it turns out, I wasn't able to boot my Windows XP installation anymore. The system just froze when I tried booting my Windows XP slice. First I thought that the installation damaged the other partitions (someone added buggy code in sysinstall lately?). At that point I didn't dare to boot anything on the disk. I decided to give a try to Hiren's Boot CD, which has loads of warezed slicing/partitioning, recovery and backup tools, and also a loadable Mini Windows XP. I hoped I would be able to find out what happened. But guess what? Neither of the Boot CD tools were able to start up, not even the Mini Windows XP! They all froze just like my Windows XP. But that's just weird. On a whim, I disabled my disk drive in the BIOS settings. And guess what? Both the Mini Windows XP and the tools were able to start because of that. I was able to read the slices/partitions with them, and noticed that all my files on the FAT32 and NTFS slices were intact. So I continued to use only FreeBSD. It didn't hinder me (much), maybe FreeBSD as a desktop system was bit of a nuisance for some things I used to do only on Windows, but I got used to it later. So I can say that this facilitated (well, forced) a switch to using FreeBSD as a desktop system. Despite that I lost the ability to boot XP from my disk, I'm happy with the switch, and that is all that matters. :D ========================= OK, seriously. sysinstall asked something new when I installed 8.0, something like "It is safe to use a disk geometry of 123/45/6789 on modern computers... Would you like to use this disk geometry?", I chose "Yes". Safe my ass. I guess my computer doesn't fit in sysinstall's definition of "modern". But how can this destroy Windows apps? I mean FreeBSD works just fine, and can read everything from the FAT32 and NTFS partitions. So what does Windows stuff suck at? Should the disk geometry proposed in sysintall work according to some standard, but yet it doesn't, because Windows stuff is buggy? Or is it non-standard but, uniquely, FreeBSD works with it? Or is it something totally different?
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