Message-ID: <001201bfe76e$b5e36260$5710603e@nitz>
From: "Barbara Nitz" <nitz AT gmx DOT net>
To: <opendos AT delorie DOT com>
References: <01bfe5e4$44616140$ae57b7d4 AT default><3 DOT 0 DOT 5 DOT 32 DOT 20000705100744 DOT 0089aeb0 AT earthlink DOT net> <3 DOT 0 DOT 5 DOT 32 DOT 20000705121927 DOT 00898100 AT earthlink DOT net>
Subject: Re: Recognizing SCSI HDD
Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 18:50:01 +0200
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Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com

Thanks for the pointer to DRDOS.org, and the drive letter assignment
explanation for the cdrom drives makes sense! (Yes, I did assign D in the
config/autoexec. doh)

>DOS recognizes the first "active partition" as being Drive C:<
>We're also talking about a WIN NT system wherein the only function of DOS
is to boot from the floppy disk and provide Disk Image an opening to make an
image of the NTFS Partitions, Let's not get lost here.<

Well, my active partition is NTFS formatted and will stay that way, as my
machine is an NT machine, as Bob pointed out. This is also the reason why I
won't use any FDISK from DOS on my HDD, it just might make the partition
table unusable. Partition Magic works nicely to set active partitions and to
switch the layout *if* you have a driveimage as backup (which I currently
don't have).

> What motherboard are you using? What bios and ver?<
Asus P2B-S, Bios revision 2.01.

> Does the bios (cmos setup) have a "boot from scsi" option?<
Yes, either boot from SCSI first or boot from IDE first. Does not matter, as
I also have an option turned on that drive A is the one to be checked before
C. I do boot from A, and this succeeds. DOS just does not recognize the FAT
partition as a C drive.

> If you disable the onboard AHA bios, it needs to know what to try and boot
from. That would make your SCSI drive c: <
Well, it *should* make the FAT partition (third on the hard disk) C, but it
does not. I am booting from floppy.

> Obviously, I think it is primarily a cmos/bios setup problem<
Well, I did some reading on OpenDOS features and setup, and I now believe it
is a design flaw in OpenDOS. From all FDISK descriptions it sounds as if the
FAT partition *must* be the first partition on any hard drive, not matter if
you want to boot from it or not. So I guess DriveImage is useless as a
backup tool in my setup, as there's no way to get DOS to recognize a FAT
partition located *after* a non-FAT partition.

Barbara