From owner-freebsd-questions Fri May 12 19:59:04 1995 Return-Path: questions-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id TAA22355 for questions-outgoing; Fri, 12 May 1995 19:59:04 -0700 Received: from sbstark.cs.sunysb.edu (sbstark.cs.sunysb.edu [130.245.1.47]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id TAA22349 for ; Fri, 12 May 1995 19:59:02 -0700 Received: (from root@localhost) by sbstark.cs.sunysb.edu (8.6.12/8.6.9) with UUCP id WAA25600 for questions@freebsd.org; Fri, 12 May 1995 22:58:31 -0400 Received: (from gene@localhost) by starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu (8.6.11/8.6.9) id TAA03714; Fri, 12 May 1995 19:38:47 -0400 Date: Fri, 12 May 1995 19:38:47 -0400 From: Gene Stark Message-Id: <199505122338.TAA03714@starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu> To: "Steve Galle" Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org In-reply-to: "Steve Galle"'s message of Fri, 12 May 1995 11:18:11 -0700 Subject: Re: MSDOS Partition Sender: questions-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >You have a time bomb on your hands. Mine just blew a few days ago. The problem >is that even though you did the fdisk and set the new partitioning, the >disklabel is still telling dos it has the whole disk to play with. Of course, a Does DOS have a "disklabel"? What seems to happen is the following: If you use FDISK to partition your disk, and then you format one slice under DOS, and then you change the MBR partition table with FDISK, you leave the DOS slice starting at the same place, but you reduce its size, and then you put good FreeBSD data in the area that used to be allocated to DOS, but isn't any more, and then you use DOS FORMAT to try to reformat the smaller slice, then DOS will quite happily and quickly ignore what the MBR says and format over your good FreeBSD data. The solution is to backup your DOS area, then use FreeBSD to write garbage (like a copy of /kernel, or something) over the beginning of the DOS slice so that it doesn't appear to be valid to DOS. Then you can reformat safely under DOS. - Gene Stark