dprrhb@inetg1.ARCO.COM (Reginald H. Beardsley) (06/20/91)
Having been afflicted by this I know what the problem is and how to cure it (I THINK) I HAVE NOT TRIED THIS, THERE MAY BE A GOTCHA!!!!!!! 1) dd if=/dev/hd0 of=tmp count=1 2) VERY carefully write over the Mark Williams message with blanks 3) dd if=tmp of=/dev/hd0 count=1 You can read and write the boot sector as shown above with MKS Toolkit under DOS. You can do it under Minix. (which is a bit safer since you can keep a standalone boot setup on floppies). I presume you can do it under Coherent. THIS IS A VERY DELICATE OPERATION. I WILL EVENTUALLY DO IT MYSELF, BUT HAVE NOT GOTTEN UP THE NERVE YET SINCE IT IS NOT ESSENTIAL. THE ABOVE MAY BE WRONG. TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THIS LOOK IN THE "DOS Encyclopedia" from Microsoft Press or "Writing MS-DOS Device Drivers in C" from Prentice-Hall. If anyone has done this, knows more about it, etc. PLEASE POST. It is very obnoxious of Mark Williams to rewrite the bootblock without warning. It is quite embarrassing to borrow a machine to use with Coherent and return it in munged condition with the "Mark Williams" message appearing everytime the owner boots the machine. -- Reginald H. Beardsley ARCO Information Services Plano, TX 75075 Phone: (214)-754-6785 Internet: dprrhb@arco.com