Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 03:30:03 -0800 (PST) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-bugs Subject: Re: Re: Re: conf/963: Using the whole disk can end unbootable Message-ID: <199601231130.DAA02564@freefall.freebsd.org>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
The following reply was made to PR conf/963; it has been noted by GNATS. From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: muir@idiom.com (David Muir Sharnoff) Cc: FreeBSD-gnats-submit@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Re: Re: conf/963: Using the whole disk can end unbootable Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996 09:54:02 +0100 (MET) As David Muir Sharnoff wrote: > > What you are warning against is that it doesn't work with other > operating systems. It also needs to warn that it cannot be used > with the bootmgr. It also warns that it eats up the disk ``from the very first sector''. > * As i wrote: please submit a better text. > > Either it wasn't bypassed or a different boot manager wasn't written. A different ``boot manager'' was written. The disklabel itself. > As far as I know the problems I had were because the boot selector > didn't work. I didn't do anything special to install it, but there > was an old one already there. It should be wiped out without a whisper. > If a special boot loader must be used with a disk that isn't using > slices, then that boot loader needs to be installed! No special boot loader. Please think about it. The disk is being used by FreeBSD *from the very first sector*. That is exactly the sector of the disk where your beloved boot manager was sitting. It's apparent that there is no room for any fancy boot selector anymore, and that's why we decided to make it not the default, and why there's yet another warning that you might shoot into your foot if you don't really know what you are doing. Sigh, you apparently didn't know what you are doing, but selected it anyways. How should we protected people like you from shooting in their feet without bothering those too much that have a good reason to use the feature? The feature is intended for people who do not care at all about DOS, Linux, OS/2, Winglows, boot selectors, or whatnot. There are those folks around, allot actually, and they are our ``more serious customers'', i.e. often in the corporate environment, where the machines run 7*24 hours per week. We have been embarassing them too much with our 2.0.5 attitude of ``install a DOS partition first if you can't get the geometry troubles resolved''. That's the whole story why the ``dangerously dedicated'' mode is there. Perhaps we should add this headline to the window, with an emphasize on ``dangerously''. Again: submit a better warning text, please, or i'll close the PR since i fail to see how to `fix' the problem. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199601231130.DAA02564>