> Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 15:52:34 +0000 > From: "Steven C. Darnold" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: HD problem > > Can any of you guys think of a reason why DOS > (running on a floppy) is unable to access a HD > when Linux (booting from floppy to ramdisk) is > able to.
Sure. Remember Seagate's "Disk Manager"? Everyone has used it at one time or another, as HD sizes grew beyond that which the BIOS/OS could "see". It created a (low-revision) DOS boot record in an alternate location on the disk. When you booted it up, DM's (or other alternative boot manager's) code referenced that alternative DOS boot record, then jumped there. More modern alternatives boot to a brief screen permitting a choice of booting from a DOS floppy, or continuing its now-"normal" boot process. Your Linux boot record created the partitions, in- cluding the one where DOS resides. When you boot from DOS (which version?) on a floppy, it can't interpret the Linux-installed information on track Zero. (Most likely, a problem of 32-bit addressing versus 16-bit, though there are other possibilities.) I don't have a good strategy to fix it - but installing Linux first (on a Linux-formatted disk) could make an older DOS floppy boot non-operative. - John T. (more of a lurker these days...) __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
