X-Apparently-From: Message-ID: <01d601c04023$ddf751e0$cb881004@dbcooper> From: "Patrick Moran" To: References: <00b801c02814$cc72b3a0$0400000a AT alain-nb> Subject: Re: DRDOS FDISK Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:06:18 -0600 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.3018.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.3018.1300 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com Hello Alain, Your message is a little confusing. You seem to have inadvertently interchanged primary and extended in your discussion in some areas. I will use the ^^^ to indicate these in your original message and make my comments after each portion. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alain" To: Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2000 5:33 PM Subject: Re: DRDOS FDISK > I have successfully added a DR-DOS partition to a MS-DOS 7.1 (win98) > system, but I didn't use DR-DOS's fdisk ;-) I do not have a copy of 98 to play with, but have used DRDOS sucessfully with WIN 3.xx, 95, and ME. So 98 should be the same. I have used DRDOS FDISK for all of these as well as NT 4.01. I USUALLY use Linux FDISK when installing Linux, however the newer DRDOS 7.03 FDISK /X will now allow partitioning many other file systems. I have used it with NTFS. It laso has OS/2 and many, many other filesystem types. I have not yet used DRDOS FDISK for Linux ext2 and swap, but see no reason why it should not work. I am really baffled by all of the talk about DRDOS FDISK. The only thing any FDISK does is make entries into the last 66 bytes of the very first sector of track zero on a hdd. Actually the last 2 bytes are the signature bytes that IBM uses which is 55 AA or AA 55 (depending on if you are reading as in a hex editor or as the BIOS itself reads it. BIOS will read these two bytes backwards.) There are 4 entries of 16 bytes each. One byte indicates if this is the active partition or not. One byte is for the filesystem type, i.e. DOS, BIGDOS, NTFS, ext2, FAT 32, DOS extended, etc. Several bytes are used to show the starting sector and length on partition. This is just simple hex data entry. The rest of this sector contains a small crude binary file which is read by the BIOS and executed for reading the partition table and selecting the sector to actually boot from. In fact this first sevtor could be any length you choose, the BIOS will just read the first 512 bytes of whatever is there. It can find this location simply by detecting the appropriate sync bits needed to identify this sector on the drive. Most drives that are manufactured today are mostly compatible with IBM PC and use a HARD SECTOR FORMAT. However, it would appear that soft sector formatting could also be used. I ran across a problem that a person was having with his HDD after he sent it in to Seagate to have it referbished. They sent it back with some weird sector size that was larger than 512 bytes per sector. This was the format designed for that particular model number, but for some reason there were some made with 512 byte sectors and Seagate seemed to be unaware of this. After this person communicated with Seagate several times, it was decided to send the drive back and they reformatted it for 512 byte sectors. I do not see how they could have done that with a HARD sector format unless they had to actually replace the platters in the drive. > > BTW, I lost the message with the information about what should be in > the OEM signature to be MS-DOS compatible. Can someone please > resend it to me? :) What are you referring to here? Is this the OEM of the BOOT SECTOR? NOTE: The BOOT SECTOR is a different sector than the partition table sector. I think this is where people are very confused. The BOOT SECTOR is located at the very first sector of a PARTITION. The Master Boot Record (MBR) is where the Partition Table is located, not the BOOT RECORD/SECTOR of a partition. For a hard drive that uses a DOS FDISK the MBR/Partition Table is located at physical track 0 which is Cylinder 0, Head 0, Sector 0. Normally (without using some utility to bypass bad tracks, etc.) the first partition will start on track 1, which is Cylinder 0, Head 1, Sector 0. Note: Stupid MS/Gates does not use the industry standard of Sector 0 as being the first sector of a track, instead they use sector 1 as the first sector. This can get somewhat comfusing when using some DISK EDITORs and switching between physical and logical interegating of the drive. What is really confusing in this thread of messages is that people are talking about more than one thing. My original message that started this thread was about problems that people claim to have with DRDOS FDISK. I was not referring to the BOOT SECTOR. I think everything I have read thus far in this thread about FDISK problems (a couple of exceptions) has been about problems with the BOOT RECORD/SECTOR. However, I can appreciate this to some extent, because DRDOS FDISK does format the drive when running FDISK, thus it will put the DRDOS info in the BOOT RECORD when it does this. However, you can use whatever format command you wish to change this and format the partition(s). This is really two different topics and now I seem to understand that it is not FDISK where the problem is occuring, but in the format of the BOOT RECORD. In retrospec of this paragraph that I am replying to now, I am at a loss as to WHAT signature you want. The last two bytes of the MBR AND each BOOT RECORD will have the two byte I metioned above for it's signature. This is not an MS signature, but a requiremant originally demanded by IBM to recognize various types disk formats. Originally IBM was going to be able to read all types of formats and even use various formats for the IBM. i.e it would be able to detect an IBM diskette from an APPLE diskette from a UNIX diskette. However, many companies using various stupid copy protection schemes, screamed about this capability becuase it would allow anyone to copy thier diskettes. So instead of changing these stupid (easy to defeat) to more sophisticated methods of copy protection, they wanted IBM to change this. So now we have to have special programs to read these other formats and some such as the APPLE DOS 3.2 and 3.3 were never developed. (This really ticks me off.) (I have the Central Point Deluxe Option Board, which can duplicate just about any type of diskette, including APPLE ][ DOS 3.2/3.3/ProDOS/Mac. However, it cannot duplicate Commordore C-64/128 diskettes because of a different modulation method used.) > I found a problem in DR-DOS about the dive letters assigment. Let me > describe it: if I have a drive (only one) with _two_ primary partitions and > an extended partition, MS-DOS uses the active partition as C:, the > extended partition as D: and the other extended partition as E:. This is a ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ This is what I found to be confusing. You talk about two primary and one extended, then you talk about one primary and two extended. Drive D: will be the other PRIMARY partition and E: and above will be assigned as logical drives in the EXTENDED partition. MS DOS does the same thing. NT does not. (At least through MS DOS 5.0, I have not used 6.0 and later very much to check out the differences. Primary partitions are assigned first for all drives containing primary partitions. Then LOGICAL drives are assigned their letters. Whatever drive is assigned to be the boot drive and whatever partition on that drive is marked as ACTIVE for that drive will be assigned DRIVE C: This can included a CDROM/RAM drive, a ZIP drive, Jazz drive, Syquest drive, LS-120 drive, or any HDD using an IDE interface. With SCSI drives you have an even greater selection to some degree. Either ID-0 or ID-1 can boot and you can have several SCSI controllers in one system. However, if a system has both IDE and SCSI (without a special BIOS) drives, then it will boot from whatever IDE drive is the assigned boot drive. Ultimately what this means is that whatever drive is assigned to location 80h will be the boot device (except of course the floppy drive(s).) > general rule: extra primary partitions go at the end. With DR-DOS, the > first extended partition is C:, and the second is D:, leaving the extended ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > partition as E:. The biggest problem is that if you put DR-DOS in the ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Again, this is confusing. Here you are talking about three extended partitions, which cannot be done. YOU MAY ONLY have ONE DOS EXTENDED partition. You may have many logical drives in a DOS EXTENDED partition. I suggest that maybe you should use the terms PRIMARY, LOGICAL and PHYSICAL to designate the drives you are referring to. > second partition it _cannot_ boot as it changes from C: to D: in the middle > of the boot process. So if you want to have more than one partition > to select which is active, DR-DOS HAS TO BE in the first one. I don't > know for sure, but this may also afect DR-DOS+Linux in the same drive... This statement is also very confusing. So rather than disagree with what you have stated, I will make a statement of my own which relates to this. I have used multiple operating systems on a single drive and multiple drives. I have used several different boot mangers. A few years ago I had a small partition with Novell DOS 7 installed on the first partition of the drive which was a primary partition. I has OS/2 Warp 3.0 installed on a logical drive in the extended partition on this drive. I had a small partition installed for Linux in a primary partition. I had the OS/2 boot manager installed in a very small primary partition. All of these were on one drive. I had my 256MB Syquest removable cartridge SCSI drive. I could format these cartridges for FAT 16, OS/2 floppy, Linux ext2, Linux swap. These cartridges could be partitioned into several partitions if needed. So for addition programs and storage space I could select a cartridge formatted and partitioned for whatever purpose I had for whichever OS I was running. I did have some problems when switching (unloading and loading/ mounting and unmounting) between DOS and OS/2 floppy formats and getting the system to recognize the new cartridges. OS/2 did not like FAT 16 and DOS did not like the OS/2 floppy format. As long as I did not change the cartridge with a different format than what it contained when I booted I was okay. This was only a problem with automatically seeing that a cartridge had been changed. I could manually unmount and mount the drive and be okay. At first I used the OS/2 boot manager to select the OS to boot. Later I installed LILO Linux boot manager to boot whichever OS I wanted. LILO was installed in the BOOT RECORD of the Linux ext2 partition. I could use the DOS FDISK and select whichever primary partition I wanted to boot from, i.e. MBR (to go directly into DOS if I had some other boot problems) OS/2 primary BOOT SECTOR (not the extended partition/logical drive where OS/2 resided) or the BOOT RECORD in the ext2 partition for LINUX. NOTE: DOS is incapable of reading OS/2 HPFS, OS/2 boot manager partition, Linux ext2 or Linux swap partitions. However, the BIOS can read the first Sector of any partition. Thus I could boot from the MBR, OS/2 Boot Manager, or Linux LILO Boot Manager simply by running FDISK and changing the active partition. So I do not see any reason why DRDOS has to be on the first primary partition. There may be some restrictions when using other OSes as to where they can reside and where they must boot from. Also utilities like Stacker, Double Drive, Double Space, etc. may have stupid requirments. Whichever partition is the active partition will be drive C: This partition will be assigned to location 80h and the BIOS will boot from 80h (or floppy.) However, let's take a look at the entire boot process before I proceed. Well I'll just start with the boot process for the drive/partition assigned to 80h instead of going through the whole nine yards. First the BOOT RECORD is read. The Boot Record contains information about the partition, such as: sector size, number of sides, sectors per track, cylinders, etc. It also conatains a boot program called the boot loader. This boot loader program will tell the BIOS what program(s) is to be loaded next. This may be DOS, Linux, NT, OS/2, UNIX, Solaris, etc or a boot manager such as OS/2, LILO. DRDOS LOADER, NT LOADER, etc. To make things a little easier to understand, lets just assume we have one drive with a single primary partition and DOS installed. For MS users the files names will be IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS. For DRDOS and PCDOS and others they will be IBMBIO.COM and IBMDOS.COM respectively. 1. IBMBIO.COM will be loaded 2. IBMDOS.COM will be loaded 3. CONFIG.SYS will be read and appropriate modifications will be invoked. 4. COMMAND.COM will be loaded. (Note; the name and location of this file can be modified in the CONFIG.SYS file.) 5. AUTOEXEC.BAT file will be run. (Note: the name and location of this file can be modified in the CONFIG.SYS file.) Now if drive designations are changed during the boot process, like Stacker, SuperStore, Double Drive, Double Space, and others do, then you may have to modify the COMSPEC line in the CONFIG.SYS file and make two copies of the AUTOEXEC.BAT file and put on copy on each of the affected drives. So even if there is some reason for drive letters to change when booting to DOS, the fix is easy and is done in the above mentioned drive compression program. NT does not seem to use any such scheme for it's drive compression, nor does WIN 9.x FAT 16 compression.) I have not played around with installing DRDOS on any other partition other than the first primary of the first physical IDE drive since Novell DOS 7.0, but see no reason why that should have changed. I have helped people install DR/MS DOS on ZIP and LS-120 IDE drives and they could boot to DOS this way instead of FDISKing and reformatting their HDD. Most manufactures ship their systems with a single primary partition with the OS installed.(Really stupid!) I can't blame people from not wanting to have to go through all of this so they can have an independent DOS by totally wiping everything out on their HDD and installing WINDOZE and everything from scratch. MS seems to think that people should just run DOS MODE 7.x and leave it at that. (Idiots!) As far as your statement about Linux goes, I'll address that here. In Linux, the primary partitions are assigned this way (assuming one IDE drive in the system for now.) hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4 Drives in the extended partition are assigned as follows: hda5 hda6 hda7 hda8 hda9 . , , hda24 SCSI would be the same as above except they would be sda instead of hda and will end at sda16 intead of sda24. The second IDE drive would be hdb instead of hda. etc. One of the problems with DRDOS FDISK and I do not remember for certain which versions did this and some MSDOS versions also do this and that is: When you use Linux FDISK,CFDISK, etc. to partition your drive and later use DOS FDISK and rewrite the partition table for any reason including changing the active partition, it will play musical chairs with the position in which Linux assigned the partitions. Thus hda2 may become hda3, etc. This does not bother DOS itself, but NT and other OSes will also see these changes. DRDOS 7.03 FDISK has eliminated this problem by always assigning the DOS EXTENDED partition to the last of the four partition entries in the MBR. I know that DRDOS 7.01 and 7.02 (Open and Caldera DOS.) I do not recall if Novell DOS 7 did this. I did have it installed when I first started playing around with Linux, but cannot remember if it did this. I know that some MSDOS versions also did this, but do not recall which versions and I have not fooled around with any versions later than 6.0. Also for some strange reasons that I do not understand, DOS FDISK cannot delete non standard partitions. DRDOS FDISK 7.03 can. I have seen some other FDISK programs that can delete non standard DOS partitions. In the past, I had a short little program that could be entered through DEBUG and wipe out the partition table. Most people do not have a disk editor or peograms like Disk Manager, etc. The first MS fiasco that I ran across about this was when people tried to upgrade from MS DOS 3.x to MSDOS 5.0. This may also have been true with some early DRDOSes, but do not remeber having any such problem with my system, but I never did have any DRDOS 3.xx on my systems and those that I used at work that did have DRDOS 3.41, I did not upgrade to DRDOS 5.0. What happened is that people that had MSDOS 3.x installed could not re-partition their drives with MSDOS 5.0 FDISK. They could not delete the MSDOS 3.x partitions. The only way you could do this was by booting to DOS 3.x from floppy and using it's FDISK and remove the partitions. Then boot from MSDOS 5.0 floppy and running it's FDISK and partition the drive that way. (Really, really stupid.) Of course you could use a Disk Editor or a third party program such as Disk Manager. (I made a lot of money on this fiasco!) I am not certain how multiple drives with multiple primary partitions and each with an extended partitions work with IDE drives. I can check out the SCSI stuff sometime. I just installed another IDE drive in my bother's computer from his old computer. It is a 120MB Conner drive and made it the master and changed his WD 850MB drive to a slave. He is in the process of backing up his files so that we can put DRDOS 7.03 and WINDOZE 3.1 on the 120MB and NT on the 850MB drive. I will experiment with multiple primary partitions on each drive and a logical drive on each and see what happens since I will be FDISKing and reformatting both drives anyway. He currently has Novell DOS 7 on the 120 and DRDOS 7.03 on the 850 and WINDOZE 3.1 on the 850. So I'll play with it some before I install NT. I have to Install 95 first on the 120MB in order to install NT. For some reason we can no longer install NT from WIN 3.1. I believe he did once a long time ago and am certain he had Novell DOS 7.0 installed. Also the 7.03 that is currently on his system may be the upgrade from 7.02 instead of the 7.03 full release. I don't remember when the last time he trashed the system and re-installed DOS, and not certain which 7.03 he now has on floppy. I will make certain he has the current 7.03. There were some files that were different in the upgrade and full versions. Some of the files were different sizes. I do not recall which ones but some of them were amoung the system fi les. The NT version he has is the student version that came with the MSCE course and does not have the standard files I need to make to NT boot and install diskettes. I have to install it off a CD. I will use the WINDOZE 95a that comes with those CDs and not use the 95B, that way I can use a lot less space to install 95 on the 120MB drive and use the complete 850 for the NTFS filesystem. He like to play those stupid old arcade games, like DOOM, Wizardry, etc. He cannot get half of them to run in DOS and uses WINDOZE 3.1 for thos and a ton of them are WINDOZE only games. Maybe some or all of these games will run under NT. Something will have to go if he wants to run them all under DRDOS/WINDOZE 3.1. There will not be enough space. Since I do not play these games, I do not have a clue as to what will work and what will not work with NT. In closing, I think you may be mistaken about how the primary partiton and extended partitions are assigned their drive letters in DRDOS. Howver, since your message was very confusing, I'll check DRDOS 7.03 on my brother's computer before I install NT. I may even check out 7.05, but do not see why there would be any difference as I would still be using the 7.03 FDISK. I may also check out the Novell DOS 7.0 FDISK as well. If he will let me play with it for several days, I may also check out MSDOS 6.22xxxx whatever it was! Also, Does anyone know what variation of MSDOS is used with the NT Command Prompt? All I show when I run ver is WINNT 4.0. Pat __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com