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Date:      Wed, 23 Aug 1995 15:37:39 +0930 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
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:  <199508230607.PAA29009@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <199508221851.EAA19165@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from "Bruce Evans" at Aug 23, 95 04:51:24 am

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Bruce Evans stands accused of saying:
> >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.

That's what I was trying to get at - stuffing the bogus partition into 
the partition table would be less than fun; passing it in to the kernel
for adoption as a 'mutant' slice would be tidy and ideal.  Can this
be done?  What needs to be done to make it happen?

> But this seems harder than using my previous suggestion:
> 1. Boot with an msdosfs, cd9660 or ufs-on-cdrom root.

This is Very Bad.  Imagine telling a user that they had to create
\etc, \bin, \dev etc directories just to testdrive. 

This loses bigtime.  I'd much prefer being able to pass extra slice entries
(note the plural) in to the kernel.  Can we do this?

> Does fbsdboot run under Win95?  Under OS/2?

Probably no, and definitely no.  If you have OS/2 and a FAT filesystem, 
you can dual boot & run fbsdboot, and I suspect that under W95 you can
drop down into 'doom mode' and run fbsdboot from there.

> Bruce

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au   [[
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