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Date: Mon, 25 Nov 1996 12:39:36 +1100
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199611250139.MAA11746@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: bde@zeta.org.au, rgrimes@GndRsh.aac.dev.com
Subject: Re: 2.2-ALPHA install failure
Cc: current@freefall.freebsd.org, darrylo@sr.hp.com, jkh@time.cdrom.com
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>> If you run a third party fdisk program on the disk, then the disk isn't
>> dedicated.
>
>Dedicating one drive, does not mean dedicating all drives, Microsoft's
>install procedures are known for there ``I want the whole world'' phylosophy
>and can cause people great pain if installed with on another disk in
>the same systems as one of the FreeBSD ``bogus'' partitioned disks.

Surely this is only caused by a installer error?  I haven't used W95,
but older versions of W can be installed in any directory on any hard
disk and don't seem to touch other disks or directories (except for the
usual things in the root directory).

>hold in the real world that I have to deal in (and yes, I had some
>customers get there FreeBSD disks totally spammed by a Microsoft product
>when I had left the fdisk 50K block MBR on it, never never again shall
>AAI ship such a system.  (2 year old company policy now...))

Well, my first rule was to only use dedicated disks if you know what
you're doing.  All administrators of the system need to know too.
The dedicated partition table is probably always invalid because the
FreeBSD slice contains the MBR and normal slices never contain the MBR.
Most third party fdisks seem to have no problems with it, but you have
to be careful with new versions.

Bruce