Mail Archives: opendos/2000/09/18/08:59:55
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bob Jonkman" <bjonkman AT sobac DOT com>
To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Sent: Saturday, September 16, 2000 7:24 PM
Subject: Re: DRDOS FDISK
> This is what Charles Dye <opendos AT delorie DOT com> said about
> "Re: DRDOS FDISK" on 16 Sep 2000, at 17:01
>
> > At 06:29 PM 9/15/00 -0600, "Pat" wrote:
>
> > DR-DOS can create partitions that are big-time incompatible
> > with MS-DOS, possibly resulting in trashed volumes if such
> > drives are accessed by The Evil Empire DOS. I don't recall the
> > size limit -- 127 megs, perhaps? -- but I'm pretty sure I first
> > saw the problem on a Maxtor 7120.
----snip-----
Actually. you replied to the wromg person. That was a reply to me. I know
this can happen, I saw it a lot on FIDOnet.
The gentleman that replied to me, said that he had problems when installing
MS crap for DOS after using DRDOS FDISK. Why someone would do this, I have
no idea, however, I have done this when checking out things for one reason
or another. I'll completely backup my drive C: to tape and install another
OS. It might be FreeDOS, RTXDOS. MSDOS, DOS 2.11, or whatever. I have
installed MSDOS 5.0 and 6.0 and possibly 6.1 and not run into any problems.
However, there is one thing that I do that he may not have done. I usually
will format the drive with whatever the native OS I intend to put on the
drive.
I learned a very long time ago, how flakey and funky. MScrap can be. From
what he has described, it appears to be a FORMAT problem rather than FDISK.
I don't think people understand the difference between the MBR and BOOT
SECTOR and that they are not one and the same. He talked about the DRDOS
signature. This is only in the BOOT sector and not in the MBR sector. The
MBR does not have a signature, except for the last two bytes of AA 55 or
whatever it was that IBM requires and that is also required in the last two
bytes of the boot sectors of all partitions. He did not describe an FDISK
problem other than cluster size. That can be blamed on to Gates and compay
as I explain in my reply to him. I usually use Disk Manager to fix this
problem or boot to Linux and use Linux FDISk.
I forgot to mention it in my message to him, but he will probably read this
message as well. Stupid MS developed DOS 2.0 and at that time most HDDs were
5-10MB in size, so they went with a 12 bit FAT and that has a standard
cluster size of 8k or 16 sectors per cluster. MS still uses that and if you
have a small partition (I don't recall the limit but it is somewhere around
12MB) it will use FAT 12 and 8k clusters!
Other than his remarks about cluster size for small drives, I did not see
anything that related to a problem with FDISK. I understand the difficulties
that people have understanding things like partitions, formats, types of
memory, memory management, etc. So I do not jump on them and correct them. I
started my learning way.way, way, back on an IBM 360, used binary entry,
hexidecimal entry, paper tape, normal audio cassette tapes, punch cards,
etc. So I have a very good background in computers.
I learned just about everything there is to APPLE DOS 3.2 and 3.3, long
before there was such an animal as an IBM PC. I learned it from the binary
code in the boot ROM, to the boot sector, catalog, and track/sector lists.
It was not hard to learn MS DOS after this, several years later.
I constructed my first PC from bare boards starting in 1976. It was an OSI
6502 system. I ahd to learn the hardware and software and binary coding to
construct this system. I had to do the final designing of the systems as
there were many optional ways to constuct this computer, including using a
MOS 6502, Motorola 6800, and a 12 bit PDP8 microprocessor. Later you could
even add a Z-80 to the system!
Pat
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