From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Nov 24 18:18:55 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id SAA28520 for questions-outgoing; Sun, 24 Nov 1996 18:18:55 -0800 (PST) Received: from bort.mv.net (root@bort.mv.net [192.80.84.6]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id SAA28513 for ; Sun, 24 Nov 1996 18:18:49 -0800 (PST) Received: from logrus.mv.com (knh-1-01.mv.com [207.22.5.21]) by bort.mv.net (8.8.3/mem-951016) with SMTP id VAA00311 for ; Sun, 24 Nov 1996 21:18:46 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <1.5.4.32.19961125021413.0067ae80@pop.mv.net> X-Sender: logrus-jv@pop.mv.net X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.4 (32) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 24 Nov 1996 21:14:13 -0500 To: questions@freebsd.org From: Jeff Clough Subject: FreeBSD & Win95 (Yes, Win95) Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk To Whom It May Concern: I apologize for sending this out to the FreeBSD gurus, but I just know that if I came knocking on Microsoft's door with this I would be laughed at for ten generations and incur the wrath of the almighty Bill Gates for tampering with the constrictive nature of Win95, and entertaining the foolish thought that UNIX could be better than his unscalable, pseudo-protected-memory, poor-excuse-for-multi-tasking operating system. So, I thank you for bearing with me. =) My machine's guts consist of a Cyrix 686 166MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM, two hard drives (one 1.2 GB Mode 4 as the master and one 1.6 GB Mode 4 as the slave, both IDE) and an 8X CD ROM drive. This machine is running Win95. I decided to take the plunge and install FreeBSD, so I copied my C drive (the 1.2) to a subdirectory of my D drive (the 1.6) and used the FDISK that came with Win95 to delete the old partition and create two new partitions, each 600 MB long. After some futzing, I was able to copy my backed up data from the D drive to the new C drive, and was able to get Win95 to come up without going too haywire. I then installed FreeBSD, with BootMGR so that I could have a dual boot between Win95 and FreeBSD. FreeBSD installed smoothly. I rebooted my machine and was pleased to see BootMGR greet me with "F1 dos, F2 FreeBSD, F3 disk2". FreeBSD came up great. However, Win95 does not like the FreeBSD partition. Utilities which seek out available disk drives (such as Norton Anti-Virus and Norton Navigator) hit the BSD partition and choke, aparrently throwing the system into an infinite loop trying to access the disk. I trimmed back these programs so that they no longer loaded on startup and am able to get Win95 to come up with a small one or two second extra delay. Win95 sets the BSD partition up as drive E:. Whenever the system tries to access this drive (when opening "My Computer", etc) I am once again greeted by the infinite loop. However, if I just stay in DOS, without loading Win95 I have only three non-removable drives listed: C: for my 600 MB DOS drive; D: for my 1.6 GB DOS drive; and E: for my CD-ROM drive. Only under Win95 is there a problem, everything else seems to work great. My question is (and thank you for bearing with me) is there any way I can prevent Win95 from stalling on this partition. Any of the below (plus anything else you can think of) are viable solutions: Somehow hiding the FreeBSD file system from Win95 Installing a driver to allow Win95 to read the FreeBSD file system Changing some setting to allow Win95 to ignore the FreeBSD file system Please, help me. I am already going to be in therapy for years over this, the last thing I need now is rejection. Thank you. Thank you a lot. Sincerely, Jeff Clough +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ | If God is love, and love is blind, is Ray Charles God? | +----------------------------------------------------------------------+