Hi Andrew,
> I bought a CF card and adapter, so waiting for those to arrive. I tried the
> fdisk /bmbr command on both the installed fdisk and the live cd, both of
> them give the syntax error… operation terminated. The other fdisk mbr
> options work though. When the CF adapter arrives I should be able to get
> the files off the computer and send them. I havnt found a command which
> copys to cd, probably need to find an application for that eventually, if
> my cd drive can write. Not sure if it can.
I have limited bad news for you:
There is indeed a bug in main.c of FDISK which makes it fail
to detect any /BMBR command line option. The userint1.c code
to write the booteasy MBR looks okay, but the help screen is
indeed making a promise which main.c does not make true yet.
Interactive_User_Interface() actually lacks a menu item "MBR"
to enter the already existing, but unreachable sub-menu for
MBR related tasks, choices 0x60 and 0x61 to 0x64, code is in
Standard_Menu() for the "MBR" sub-menu already.
A file about known bugs says that BootEasy "does not work"
properly, so maybe it would be easier to just remove all
traces of that feature from code, help screen and docs??
The current main.c contains for example:
> case 'M':
> {
> if(0==strcmp(arg[0].choice,"MBR"))
> {
> Create_MBR();
> command_ok=TRUE;
>
> Shift_Command_Line_Options(1);
> }
>
...
There is no code for case 'B' yet (but for A and B, cases
are sorted alphabetically).
Code which checks for the option "BMBR" would then call
Create_BootEasy_MBR();
According to the makefile, FDISK 1.3.4 is supposed to come with
THREE assembly language source files: For booteasy, bootnorm
and smartmbr. The latter is a more recent third addition :-)
Interestingly, both "boot*.asm" files are each included
TWICE in the current FDISK download, fdisk.zip linked by:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/1.3/pkg-html/fdisk.html
Given that BootEasy might be broken anyway, I suggest
that you use the /SMARTMBR and /MBR options instead of
the /BMBR and /MBR options for now. "Smart MBR" is also
called DriveSmart, a MBR written by Tom Ehlert. This
MBR automatically uses LBA when available and fetches
CHS drive geometry info from the BIOS otherwise.
Maybe FDISK could be updated to address the listed issues.
I hope /SMARTMBR is a good alternative, Andrew :-)
Regards, Eric
PS: The act of just STARTING FDISK in interactive mode immediately
triggers Create_MBR_If_Not_Present() which invokes Create_MBR()
when no 55 AA magic is present in the MBR. There is NO question
whether the user wants this and NO message about this happening
in spite of potentially breaking any existing data inside the
MBR based on the very limited test for only two magic bytes :-(
Please make this more explicit, interactive and based on a more
reliable test, for example whether the first few bytes ALSO are
a repetition of a constant value (e.g. 00, ff or f6). Thanks!
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