Lawson,
Here is what you can tell the 13 basketful of devils :-) :
Essentially, I dont have confidence in how Win95 behaves on my
peculiar hardware. I have at different periods in time tried to assign to
Win95 partitions from my second and third drives and ended up completely
hosing the Win95 side (machine came with just one drive). Linux has never
correctly autodetected my cdrom. Initially when my machine had just one
drive, the cdrom was autodetected on /dev/hdc. The same thing happened
when I added the second drive. When I added the third drive however, my
cdrom stopped being autodetected. That was when I discovered that my cdrom
is actually physically connected to /dev/hde. Currently, Win95 only
detects one drive.
I know this has nothing to do with the master boot record. But I
have close to zero confidence in how Win95 will react to the changes I am
planning to make. Essentially I am planning to remove linux from my first
hard-drive (though I guess the lilo map files will still need to be
present on it) and assign that space to Win95 (sigh! need more space
because the wife wants to use a multifunction printer - they dont seem to
work perfectly in Linux). So I am taking the attitude that if anything
goes wrong, I can uninstall lilo perfectly without destroying anything.
As far as your information is concerned, I can state that you are
100% correct : 'fdisk /MBR' does not overwrite the partition table - just
the first 446 bytes.
Thanks,
Kenneth
There is no such thing as luck. 'Luck' is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
On Sun, 6 Jun 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>
> On Sat, 5 Jun 1999, Kenneth Stephen wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > When I purchased my PC, it came with Win95 preloaded. After
> > installing linux on it, lilo did back up the original bootsector and
> > stored it in /boot, but over the past two years, and after a couple of
> > Linux reinstalls, I lost the original bootsector (blush). Now, I am
> > planning to reorganize my Win95 partition again, and I need to recover
> the
> > original bootsector.
>
> Why, in the name of 13 basketsful of devils, do you need the original
> bootsector? I can mail you one, made by dos 6.22 or dos 3.0, I'm not
> sure which, but I'm sure there's no difference.
> >
> > The CompUSA support people that I talked to said that there is
> no
> > way I could recover just the bootsector - they could recover to the
> > original configuration shipped. But this is useless to me.
> >
> What do you expect from CompUSA? Of course it is.
>
> > They did say that 'fdisk /MBR' would recreate the original
> > bootsector. So here is what I propose to do :
> >
> > 1. Take backups of th existing bootsector. Create Linux bootdisk.
> > 2. Run 'fdisk /MBR' from within Win95. This should wipe out my
> existing
> > partition table in the MBR (first 512 bytes).
> > 3. Reboot using my Linux boot disk. Now create a copy of the old
> (backed
> > up) bootsector (file A).
> > 4. do 'dd if=/dev/hda of=/boot/B bs=446 count=1'
> > 5. do 'dd if=/boot/B of=/boot/A bs=446 count=1'
> >
> > This should give me the original bootsector with the current
> > partition tables. Am I right? Or am I shooting myself in the foot?
> Better
> > ideas are welcome.
>
> At least with the fdisk from dos 6.22 run with dosemu, fdisk /mbr does
> not molest the partition table. It just replaces the mbr boot program
> in the first 446 bytes and the magic number in the last 2, so you
> shouldn't need steps 4 and 5.
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> > Kenneth
> >
> > There is no such thing as luck. 'Luck' is nothing but an absence of bad
> luck.
> >
> Lawson
> >< Microsoft free environment
>
> This mail client runs on Wine. Your mileage may vary.
>
>
>
>
>
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