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Date:      Fri, 26 Jun 1998 18:51:35 -0700
From:      Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
To:        Matthew Thyer <thyerm@camtech.net.au>
Cc:        Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>, Matthew Thyer <Matthew.Thyer@dsto.defence.gov.au>, Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@americantv.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 'fatal trap 12' on boot (smp and up) 
Message-ID:  <199806270151.SAA09466@antipodes.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 27 Jun 1998 09:09:46 %2B0930." <35943142.6B9C1C5D@camtech.net.au> 

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> This situation has just become more urgent with the release
> of Windows 98 which I have just installed over the last several
> hours.

You might have considered that we'd be a long way ahead of you, what 
with betas having been commonly available since the beginning of the 
year.

> Now a command line only boot of Windows 98 (i.e. hitting F8 before
> Windows boots and choosing command line only from the menu) cannot
> run fbsdboot.exe without the crash just as I feared.
> 
> Now the only way to use fbsdboot.exe is to boot off a floppy disk
> that has been created with Windows 95 or earlier.
> 
> I suspect that a Windows 98 startup disk wont help but I haven't
> tried that yet.
> 
> So there is no way of booting cleanly using a version of DOS from
> Windows 98 (and beyond probably).   Therefore FreeBSD should not
> be relying on these vectors being unmodified.

I'm sorry, but this conclusion is fallacious.  You might just as easily 
suggest that, eg. Windows NT should not rely on these vectors being 
unmodified (it does).

> Soon no one will have Windows 95 or earlier so its going to be
> pretty hard to install FreeBSD from the CD-ROM.

Actually, all you droids will be running Windows 98 on "PC-98" machines 
(systems certified for Windows 98), all of which are required to 
support the El Torito CDROM boot standard.  Naturally, the FreeBSD 
CDROMs are all bootable.

> I'm sorry Mike but your answer "boot from a floppy" wont be any
> good when everyones floppies have been formatted with Windows 98!

Since the formatter doesn't matter a damn, and since the floppy I was
referring to is a FreeBSD boot floppy, and since you will still be able
to make these floppies under Windows 98 (guess whether *we* bothered to 
test with the betas), I don't actually see this as a problem except for 
the hysterical minority that are still unwilling to use any of the 
various perfectly adequate boot managers already in circulation.

Please note that FreeBSD is an _operating_system_, not a Windows
application.  If you insist on corrupting your system's private state
with another operating system, that's your own problem.

 "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."
 "Don't do that."

-- 
\\  Sometimes you're ahead,       \\  Mike Smith
\\  sometimes you're behind.      \\  mike@smith.net.au
\\  The race is long, and in the  \\  msmith@freebsd.org
\\  end it's only with yourself.  \\  msmith@cdrom.com



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