From owner-freebsd-stable Mon Feb 8 20:33:04 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id UAA01740 for freebsd-stable-outgoing; Mon, 8 Feb 1999 20:33:04 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from mail1.its.rpi.edu (mail1.its.rpi.edu [128.113.100.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id UAA01734 for ; Mon, 8 Feb 1999 20:33:01 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.acs.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail1.its.rpi.edu (8.8.8/8.8.6) with ESMTP id XAA126876; Mon, 8 Feb 1999 23:34:19 -0500 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" X-Sender: drosih@pop1.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: <199902072330.AA03060@waltz.rahul.net> Date: Mon, 8 Feb 1999 23:32:50 -0500 To: Mike Meyer , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: Fully Dedicated HD may clobber some BIOS' Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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