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Date:      Mon, 05 Jul 1999 14:17:03 +0200
From:      Graham Wheeler <gram@cequrux.com>
To:        Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>
Cc:        Adrian Filipi-Martin <adrian@ubergeeks.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Porting LILO to FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <3780A23F.91B4951D@cdsec.com>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.9907021107080.24927-100000@thneed.ubergeeks.com> <199907030731.BAA23530@harmony.village.org>

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Warner Losh wrote:
> 
> In message <Pine.BSF.4.05.9907021107080.24927-100000@thneed.ubergeeks.com> Adrian Filipi-Martin writes:
> :       The standard boot partition selection softwre also works fine
> : booting windoze OS's from other disks.  All you need to do is set the "disk
> : id" in the DOS MBR to the correct number, 0x81 for your second disk. That's
> : the only thing that MS doesn't do correctly whe installing the OS on the
> : non-primary disk.  I used to do this a long time ago to boot FreeBSD of the
> : "C" drive and the other stuff off of "second C" drive.
> 
> How does one do that?  What tools do you use?

I did this, using an old copy of Norton Disk Edit. It didn't work, 
although it did do something. Before I did it, if I told os-bs beta
to boot DOS, it would give a `non-system disk or disk error' message
(if I recall correctly; if not, it simply hung with no message). After
changing the disk ID, it got as far as `Starting MS-DOS' but hung at
that point. Note that os-bs beta was not good enough on its own.

Actually, come to think of it, I didn't quite do this - I changed the
disk ID in the boot sector of the DOS partition, rather than the MBR.
Given that you do this with Norton Disk Editor, do you have to run DE
and tweak it every time you want to change the disk? I guess one 
could write progs that runs under either O/S that will just toggle
the appropriate byte, making it a bit less convenient. It's still
a bit of a drag if you want to boot one O/S and the other is enabled,
and you're powering up - you have to boot the wrong one, toggle the
byte, and then reboot.

I subsequently gave up and tried to uninstall os-bs beta. It told me
that the uninstall option was not available. So I used Norton Disk
Editor to restore my LILO boot record - except I mistakenly specified
a logical rather than a physical sector. I spent the next day recovering
from this (to the point where I had the screwdrivers out!). I gave 
myself a hundred lines: I will not confuse the physical and the logical;
I will not confuse the physical and the logical...

In the end I was back to square one. But then I remembered the real
reason I had such a screwy setup - not for DOS itself, but because 
I wanted Windoze 3.1. But I haven't actually needed it in about two
years, so I installed os-bs 3.5, scrapped the \Linux directory on
my C: drive, and I'm quite happy (I can still boot DOS 6.2 from
Win 95 by pressing F8 and selecting `Boot previous version of MS-DOS').

I still think it would be a good thing to port LILO to FreeBSD (and/or
DOS/Windoze for that matter), but I'll leave that for another time (or
another person!)

-- 
Dr Graham Wheeler                          E-mail: gram@cequrux.com
Cequrux Technologies                       Phone:  +27(21)423-6065/6/7
Firewalls/Virtual Private Networks         Fax:    +27(21)24-3656
Data/Network Security Specialists          WWW:   
http://www.cequrux.com/


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