> Am 17.01.2025 um 18:20 schrieb Jerome Shidel via Freedos-devel > <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>: > > If a partition is set active or a MBR is written when partitioning is > performed, this would be changes in the behavior of FDISK.
Well, the MBR is always written when a primary partition is created ;) However you are right that there is a difference between Free FDISK 1.4 and Microsoft FDISK on the one side, and Free FDISK 1.3 on the other. The former write a proper IPL when the signature 55 AA is NOT found in sector zero before writing the new partition table. Free FDISK 1.3 fills the IPL area with zero instead. What might have happened to Paul is that VMware contains some heuristic to detect a non-valid IPL despite the BIOS signature 55 AA being there. I have to check that. Not writing an IPL like Free FDISK 1.3 is however not a good idea, because many BIOSes do NOT contain a heuristic to check if the IPL is valid, and then simply "execute" the non-IPL if the BIOS signature is found. So I tend to rather not change the behaviour as it is now unless absolutely necessary. But, the user should not have problems installing FreeDOS under VMware because of this. The normal procedure would be to choose the right boot order. But it seems that under VMware Workstation it is not that easy to accomplish. So let me think for a while about it. There are several options. a) If it is strictly necessary that no IPL is written, I could introduce a /noipl command line parameter that prevents FDISK from writing a proper IPL. Should be easy to adapt the FreeDOS install batch to this. b) Maybe the installed boot loader (bootnorm.asm) could be adapted to tell the BIOS to try the next device from the order of boot devices? Does anyone know if that is possible? c) some other option a fail to see right now... Bernd _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
