Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 22 Aug 95 12:32:38 MDT
From:      terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert)
To:        bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans)
Cc:        bde@zeta.org.au, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Using space in a DOS filesystem
Message-ID:  <9508221832.AA01041@cs.weber.edu>
In-Reply-To: <199508220729.RAA28551@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from "Bruce Evans" at Aug 22, 95 05:29:12 pm

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> >Hmm. I'd have hoped that the partition table could be patched after it 
> >was read by the kernel, to avoid having to rewrite the MBR every time 
> >you booted.  (Or at least checking and stuffing the bogus slice back
> >in if something 'smart' had tried to remove it.)
> 
> It would be relatively easy to check the partition once you have located
> it.  You might be able to boot from the DOS file system, run some
> utilities, mount an mfs root and create vn devices on it, mount the vn
> file, and chroot() to a nicer file system.  I don't want the utilities
> for this in the kernel.

Why not just modify a DOS runnable boot program to know how to look there?

The problem is that the partition offset would have to be passed to the
kernel, or some of the other changes we've been talking about done to the
kernel device code, plus an additional intermediate driver to find the
slab as a logical physical device.

Adding that to the default kernel would probably not be worth it unless
you were very clever about implementation, but for a "testdrive" kernel
it would be no big deal.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?9508221832.AA01041>