Mail Archives: opendos/2000/10/24/16:46:21
----- Original Message -----
From: "Neal" <lbneal AT pysmatic DOT net>
To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
Sent: Monday, September 18, 2000 5:02 PM
Subject: Re: DRDOS FDISK
> DR-DOS FDISK has a strange way of assigning the partitions.
>
> In most uses this is not a problem, but both of my retail boot loader
> systems have failed due to
> this behavior. I have had troubles with Linux booting that appeared to
> be due to this
> problem.
>
> I have made Linux partitions with DR-DOS FDISK and Linux refused to
> recognize them.
You should not have this problem with 7.03 FDISK. I believe this problem
also occurs with MSDOS, at least some versions it does.
What the problem is, is that when you run DR/MS FDISK AFTER you have already
made the partition table with some other FDISK (say Linux for example) it
will play musical chairs with the partition table entries. In other words,
it changes to position of the entries. I had problems with this and would
only use Linux FDISK. However, I checked it out with 7.03 FDISK and it does
not play musical chairs with the partition table entries. It now always
makes the DOS EXTENDED partition the fourth entry (last entry) in the
partition table.) Now if you use DRDOS FDISK to change the boot partition or
add another partition or logical drive it will not chnage the partiton entry
locations. I am not positive which versions of MS DOS also did this. I
believe I did have this problem with some versions of MSDOS. However, since
I play round with different OSes so much on my system, I did not keep track
of all the different FDISKs and their problems.
The solution is to boot Linux from floppy and run it's FDSIK, CFDISK or
other Linux FDISK and see what partiton is where, then change the fstab in
the /etc directory to reflect the proper boot partition. After installing
DRDOS 7.03, I have not had to do this.
Other boot managers may also have encountered this problem. I do not believe
it would effect any MS OSes. NT does have a different method of assigning
drives that does DOS and WINDOZE. So I don't think it should effect NT
except for possibly changing drive designations.
You can use DRDOS 7.03 FDISK with any version or maker of DOS I have tried
so far and have often recommended using it when people have had problems
with MS DOS FDISK. Everytime I have recommeded this solution and have gotten
a reply, everyone has told me it fixed the problem they were having. I have
even e-mailed it to many people to fix problems they had with MS crap FDISK.
OpenDOS 7.01 and Caldera DOS 7.02 both had this problem. I don't recall of
Novell DOS 7.0 having this problem, but may not have had it installed when
running Linux. 7.03 also has extended capabilities which will allow making
non DOS partition including forcing FAT 32 for non big drive partitions
(i.e. less than 512MB or whatever it is) Linux, OS/2 HPFS and FLOPPY, NT
NTFS, Xenix, Linux ext2, Linux swap, other Linux FS, SUN, and a ton of other
file systems. I can also force the cluster size I want to use for FAT 32
instead of accepting the default.
Pat
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