[comp.os.os2.misc] bootany

Michael_Shiels@f170.n771.z3.fidonet.org (Michael Shiels) (05/17/91)

Has anyone used BOOTANY with an Ultra store ESDI controller with a 650M 
drive?  How about a list of people/machines that have gotten it working OK.  
I think there is a problem with some of the translating ESDI controllers 
whenyou start mucking about with the partition table.  I did the install 
just like I did on an IDE drive (it worked great on that drive!) but low and 
behold it was getting very confused.  You could boot partitions 1 or 2 or 3 
and do the DOS label command and it would change the label in them all.  Ie 
I think there was a problem with it figuring out the drive dimensions/
translation to use.  Ended up using the same sectors over and over.

--- Maximus-CBCS v1.02-OS/2-R4
 * Origin: RT Lab (1:250/628)

Michael_Shiels@f170.n771.z3.fidonet.org (Michael Shiels) (05/18/91)

After much more carefully examination with a very good debugger I figure out 
that the COMPAQ FASTART program has a serious bug in it.  When you add 
partitions it does notice that the prior entries are used but it still 
starts each subsequent partition at the start of the drive.  So what I had 
was a partition table with 3 entries 10M, 20M, 20M which all overlayed each 
other.  NICE PROGRAM.  On the other hand BOOTANY seems to be OK.  I found 
one thing that seemed to not work correctly though.  When you start to do 
the INSTBOOT.BAT which runs the 2 programs to actually install the boot 
sector.  If one of your partitions is not bootable it will make it bootable 
for you.  Somehow there is a wrong calculation there because it actually 
destroyed the partition table by writing the 80h in the wrong spot.  So I 
had to go in and patch it by hand.  Has anyone modified BOOTANY to handle 2 
drives.  Ie upto 6 boot partitions?  I am using it on my development machine 
to boot 3 different versions of DOS right now.  But would like to add 2 
versions of OS/2.


--- Maximus-CBCS v1.02-OS/2-R4
 * Origin: RT Lab (1:250/628)