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Date: Wed, 23 Aug 1995 04:51:24 +1000
From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Message-Id: <199508221851.EAA19165@godzilla.zeta.org.au>
To: bde@zeta.org.au, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au
Subject: Re: Using space in a DOS filesystem
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org
Precedence: bulk

>> The mount of root would probably fail if the partition was invalid.  I
>> guess you could put the partition boundaries in the data for the program
>> replaces the standard boot loader.  How are you going to select where
>> to boot from?  Standard boot managers should be able to handle the
>> partition within a partition method (:-().

>I'm not sure I can parse that 8)  The idea was to have some way of
>avoiding jamming a bogus partition entry into the partition table
>every time you wanted to boot. (due to issues with virus tools and the 
>like.)

>Booting would probably be accomplished with fbsdboot under these
>circumstances.

If you are booting with fbsdboot then you must be running DOS so you can
run utilities under DOS to find where the image file is and write the
offset and size somewhere.  You could even write them to the partition
table after checking that this is safe.  Restoring the original
partition table is harder.  It could be done by running fdisk after
booting FreeBSD.  If you don't write to the partition table then you
will have to pass the offset and size through fbsdboot to the kernel and
modify the kernel to add an entry to the slice table.

But this seems harder than using my previous suggestion:
1. Boot with an msdosfs, cd9660 or ufs-on-cdrom root.
2. Create the necessary device files if they can't already exist.  It is
   probably best to wait for devfs to give device files with an msdosfs
   root.
3. Run utilities to find image offset and size; use new ioctl to put this
   in slice table.
4. Mount the slice and chroot() to make it the root file syste,

Does fbsdboot run under Win95?  Under OS/2?

Bruce