rdc30med@nmrdc1.nmrdc.nnmc.navy.mil (LCDR Michael E. Dobson) (05/05/90)
Be very careful when attempting to add shoelace to your hard disk, you can easily make your DOS partition non-bootable!! This happened to me today and it has taken most of the day to fix. The steps were as follows: Compiled the ShoeLace stuff under 1.5.9 on my XT clone with 30 Meg RLL hd at home. Using varargs.h, the make worked with only one warning about long to pointer conversion. Following the instructions in readme, I did laceup /dev/hd3 wini ; cat /dev/hd0 >/dev/fd0 for a few seconds ; laceup -w 1 /dev/fd0 ; booted from the floppy, and sucessfully booted both DOS (the primary active partition) and Minix from partition 3. SO far everything was acting the way I expected it to. Flushed with this success, I repeated the process on my Z-248 (AT) at work with 42 Meg MFM hd partitoned with ~21 Meg for DOS on part 1, 19 Meg for Minix /usr on part 2 and ~ 2 Meg for Minix root on part 3. Since ShoeLace seemed to work, I skipped the cat /dev/hd0 >/dev/fd0 step and dis: laceup -w 1 /dev/hd0 to put winiboot onto hd. When I attepmted to boot off the hd, I got the WiniBoot screen asking which partition I wanted to boot from. As before I could boot Minix 1.5.9 just fine, but when I attempted to boot DOS, WiniBoot complained that the DOS partition wasn't formatted!! I could no longer boot DOS off the hard disk. Booting from floppy, I could easily access all the data on the DOS partition. I was unable to restore a DOS bootstrap by any means that didn't destroy the data. In order to recover the DOS bootblok, I had to do a lowlevel format of the drive, repartition, first under DOS, then under Minix, format the partitions, then use DOS fdisk to mark the first as DOS boot. Fortunately, I had a fresh tape backup of the DOS stuff and floppy backups for Minix so all I lost was the time needed to recover. MORAL: Try ShoeLace on a floppy image of your hard disk before you put WiniBoot out there. Mike Dobson Internet: rdc30med@nmrdc1.nmrdc.nnmc.navy.mil BITNET: dobson@usuhsb.bitnet