From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Aug 30 04:18:30 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id EAA26555 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 30 Aug 1995 04:18:30 -0700 Received: from gndrsh.aac.dev.com (gndrsh.aac.dev.com [198.145.92.241]) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with ESMTP id EAA26549 for ; Wed, 30 Aug 1995 04:18:26 -0700 Received: (from rgrimes@localhost) by gndrsh.aac.dev.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id EAA07944; Wed, 30 Aug 1995 04:16:50 -0700 From: "Rodney W. Grimes" Message-Id: <199508301116.EAA07944@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> Subject: Re: Does fdisk work? To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Date: Wed, 30 Aug 1995 04:16:50 -0700 (PDT) Cc: jkh@time.cdrom.com, jehamby@lightside.com, freebsd-hackers@freefall.FreeBSD.org In-Reply-To: <199508301019.TAA28508@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Aug 30, 95 07:49:51 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1225 Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > Jordan K. Hubbard stands accused of saying: > > I'm working on this problem (really really!) for 2.1 and hope to > > have this problem behind us. For now, I suggest booting DOS and > > installing BOOTEASY that way. Really strange, BTW, that it doesn't > > see your second drive! It does mine, and I can boot DOS from > > either drive using BOOTEASY.. > > How do you boot DOS from the second disk? I was under the (mis?) > understanding that it read the partition boot code out of the first > sector in the partition, and that has 0x80 hardcoded in it. > (Or do you have DOS on both the first and second disk?) Some, actaully very few, BIOS's get this chunk of code correct as implemented by IBM in the AT BIOS. You start searching for boot devices at the first floppy, if no floppy is in the drive you look at the partition table in the MBR, if there is not 0x80 flag partition you look for at the next drive, if it has no 0x80 flag or does not exists you go look for a second floppy drive with bootable media, if no bootable media you drop to rom basic. -- Rod Grimes rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com Accurate Automation Company Reliable computers for FreeBSD