Hi Jon,
actually I do not expect "drivers" like OnTrack, Ez Drive etc. to mess with host protected areas. They just redirect attempts to access the disk by BIOS to their own code, which modifies the BIOS call parameters. Which is why OS which access disks without using the BIOS have to be configured to do suitable transformations themselves (e.g. Linux offset boot parameter) or use suitable drivers made for the specific OS in question. But you make a very important point about the transparency of the process. In the days when DOS was normal, you could probably get everything converted during the driver install process get away with it. But as soon as you have a system with 2-99 operating systems on disk, it is A LOT easier to first install the "driver" BEFORE you install any of your operating systems at all. Because otherwise, even if you take partition images and everything, you WILL end up with having to do elaborate tuning to get things to boot again. Boot managers tend to be RATHER sensitive about where and on which disk geometry the system that you want to boot is. So if you install a "driver" which changes that or even shifts everything to another offset on the disk, you will have to have some serious explaining to do until the boot process cooperates with you again. Then it's a lot easier to start with the "driver" and then install the OS of your choice later. You may still backup your files as files or in tarballs, not as disk/partition images, to add them to the freshly reinstalled OS later. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
