ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu (Lee Dickey) (03/31/88)
I am curious about the bootsector, and it is clear that George Woodside, the author of BOOTSEC, PENICILN, and CHKFMT knows a lot more than I do. ( Thanks, George ). I tried BOOTSEC on a freshly formatted disk, and found a serial number that changed after I formatted the disk again. Then I tried PENICILN on the same disk. I used the command peniciln -m a to write an MS-DOS compatible boot sector. I noticed that the serial number was 3354162, and I thought that I had seen that one before. Well, almost. What I was remembering was the number produced by IBMFMT. The program IBMFMT, posted to this net some time ago, always gives the serial number 3354163. There has been some discussion about the importance of disks having distinct serial numbers, and I guess that our built in formatting program gives us this, almost always, assuming that the generated serial number really is random. What does MS-DOS do about serial numbers? Does it matter to DOS or MS-DOS if they (serial numbers) are all the same? What "harm" will come to a TOS user ( me :-) ) who has several disks with the same serial number?