Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 19:36:06 -0800 (PST) From: Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu> To: Piers <pxharding@csi.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Free (to do what it pleases ) BSD ? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980225193106.28338L-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu> In-Reply-To: <001901bd4139$a3373ed0$270cbb0a@pxhmobilent.org.nz>
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Let me cut down the cc: to just Questions. On Tue, 24 Feb 1998, Piers wrote: > Well you can imagine my excitement when the CD turned up at home, and I > slaveringly placed it in the drive and kicked off that install. But > excitement quickly gave way to terror, when, after several attempts at > unsuccessfully completing the exercise, I tried to get NT started again > ( in the other partition ) - trying being the word. I don't know how > they did it but even though I had the MBR write protected, they still > managed ( against my fervent desire, and I like to think, carefull step > by step following the instructions ) change the active boot partition > etc. You can't really lock the MBR unless your BIOS can provide that type of service; FreeBSD ignores any NT settings. And, the partition table isn't in the MBR. > Fortunately after what seemed like a long sweety period of time, I > managed to boot off a DOS disk ( to the rescue yet again!) and set tings > right - after running the NT repair process several times to no avail. Well, if you actually installed the system, it will change the active partition to make sure it's set to the proper partition. Simply booting a DOS boot floppy with fdisk on it will fix it. > Now I know that you will say " You chose the SNAP version - so you are > taking your 'life' into your own hands" and to a certain extent you are > correct, but quite frankly I think that a standard install should go > ahead without issue, and I would expect that the install tools would be > pretty standard and error free by now. That is a lot harder than it looks because of the various quality levels of PC hardware. Plus, sysinstall is the classic definition of code spaghetti and often doesn't get polished until just before install time. We all wish it was better but writing installers isn't as easy as it looks -- trust me, I've tried. If you have any more questions, please see http://www.freebsd.org/, or write us at questions@freebsd.org. Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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