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To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/release/sysinstall disks.c 
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Date: Mon, 08 Sep 1997 00:00:09 +1100
From: David Nugent <davidn@labs.usn.blaze.net.au>
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[from committers]
>  Hehe. :-)  I have been urged by the core-team to add such a message
>  back when i proposed DD mode. ;-)  Of course, it never killed me, but
>  i know about the dangers...  The worst is that some Award BIOS doesn't
>  accept such a disk as a valid disk at all. :-((

Just in case someone is collecting this information ...

OS/2's FDISK command (which I use on my first two disks since
I use its excellent boot manager) won't touch a DD's partition
table at all. You can't remove the "partitions" in it (it says
it does, but it doesn't), can't create new ones, can't do a damn
thing. If a DD's disk is in the system and it sees it, it also
complains "no primary partition" on exiting regardless of not
having touched that disk, but this is just a benign warning.

I consider not being able to edit the "paritition table" a feature. :-)

OTOH, DOS fdisk will quite happily work with it, so at least it can
rewrite the table so that the OS/2  fdisk will then work. This is
the only way to you can reuse a previously dd'ed disk for OS/2 (other
than a low level format or "dd if=/dev/zero" directly over the boot
blocks of course).

Regards,
David