Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 23:32:50 -0500 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Mike Meyer <mwm@phone.net>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Fully Dedicated HD may clobber some BIOS' Message-ID: <v04011705b2e569fb8761@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9902080837050.22600-100000@guru.phone.net> References: <199902072330.AA03060@waltz.rahul.net>
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At 8:40 AM -0800 2/8/99, Mike Meyer wrote: >On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, Rahul Dhesi wrote: > >> I see that there are some slight risks to being "dangerously dedicated" >> if you are using a big-name system. > > If I've correctly figured out what happened, then it's more than just > "big-name" systems. My SuperMicro box lost the boot blocks on reboot a > couple of times (seems to be related to booting with a floppy in the > drive). I suspect it was the anti-virus feature of the BIOS writing a > "good" MBR onto the drive. I've since disabled that feature, but not > tried booting with a floppy in the drive again. For what it's worth, I purposely went with a "dangerously dedicated" system as my own way to avoid MBR-related viruses. I have one machine which is only going to run FreeBSD, and I assumed it would be better if the disk was entirely under the control of freebsd. On systems where I'm dual booting into anything else, I avoid the dangerously-dedicated feature. I am not much of an expert on Intel-ish hardware systems. Was I correct in thinking that there are some viruses which write over MBR blocks? Does a DD setup do much of anything to protect me from any such viruses? --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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