Hi all,
I’m currently making the changes to the OS installers regarding the overwriting
of the MBR.
The ADVANCED mode has always prompted wether or not to overwrite it.
Here is the NEW general logic used by the installer in NORMAL mode.
(There is more to it, like error and safety checks. But it basically comes down
to the following…)
if the MBR for the target hard disk DOES NOT CONTAIN any boot code in
the MBR, then ASSUME YES and overwrite it.
if the MBR for the target hard disk has ANY KIND of boot code in the
MBR, then PROMPT USER to overwrite it.
I’m thinking of also adding…
Or, if there is ONLY a single DOS partition on the drive, then ASSUME
YES.
The end result would (with the additional check) would be that when installing
FreeDOS into a Virtual Machine (as most users do), they would not be shown the
worthless prompt. When a user is updating a DOS only system with just one
partition on the drive, they would not see it either. However when installing
into system with more than one partition on that drive, for example contains
Linux or even a different version of DOS, it would prompt first.
I think it resolves 99.9% of issues regarding overwriting the MBR. There are a
couple extreme edge cases that could be still affected. But, those are very
a-typical. For example, my Pentium Pro test machine is almost such a case. It
has a single DOS boot partition, with multiple DOS installs (FreeDOS, PCDOS,
MSDOS, etc) using System Commander to boot them. However, it has an additional
data partition on that drive. So, it would be prompted as well.
For the extreme edge cases, they should know what there are doing and use
Advanced mode. Also, don’t forget the installer does
make a backup of the MBR.
:-)
Jerome
_______________________________________________
Freedos-devel mailing list
Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
