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From: Robert Nordier <rnordier@iafrica.com>
Message-Id: <199604171257.OAA01405@eac.iafrica.com>
Subject: Re: FIPS and Windows 95
To: morpheus@ezl.com
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1996 14:57:17 +0200 (SAT)
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <31747309.2CC3@ezl.com> from "Morpheus - Lord of Dreams" at Apr 16, 96 11:26:49 pm
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On Tue, 16 Apr 1996, Jeff wrote:

> Could anyone write to me regarding their success or lack thereof with 
> FIPS and Windows 95...I have successfully completed my installation of 
> FreeBSD and Windows 95 on separate drives.  A colleague, however, cannot 
> afford the extra drive space right now and wants to install on her 
> primary partition in harmony with her Windows 95 installation...
> 
> Any information would be greatly appreciated...By the way, FreeBSD is 
> very impressive...I have been particularly appreciative of the 
> comprehensive ports collection...

The present FreeBSD msdosfs code has problems with some DOS filesystem
configurations.  From the experience of others, it seems that a FIPS-
modified partition is more likely to cause DOS filesystem access from
FreeBSD to fail.  The results are not entirely predictable, but may
include corruption of part of the fixed disk data.

Fortunately, if the FreeBSD msdosfs doesn't like the DOS filesystem in
question, this tends to be obvious right away.  (If that's any
consolation.)

The msdosfs is in the process of being rewritten.

Putting aside potential FreeBSD problems, FIPS itself really relies
on a kind of trick to achieve its purpose.  And problems can arise if
anything should happen to the boot sector of a FIPS-ed partition.  Under
these circumstances, MS-DOS may silently resort to _deriving_ the
filesystem configuration values, rather than getting them from the boot
sector.  The result may well be the sort of mess that any respectable
filesystem repair utility will only aggravate.

FIPS does have its place, though, and can be used as a tool to 'bootstrap'
a partition split.  For example:

   Use FIPS to split DOS partition C: 
   DOS format the newly-created partition as D:
   Zip the entire contents of C: to D:
   Re-fdisk and re-format C:
   Unzip D: to C:

Of course, the best advice is to make a backup of the existing data and
repartition the disk from scratch.  If the backup is retained for a day or
two, it should by then be clear whether the new setup is going to work.

-- 
Robert Nordier