*BSD News Article 11068


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From: kaleb@seaview (Kaleb Keithley)
Subject: Re: how do I undo 386BSD boot blocks?
Message-ID: <1993Feb12.184310.27616@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov>
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Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1993 18:43:10 GMT
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In article terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
> because I wrote
>>There are some poor assumptions about telling people to use 'fdisk /mbr'.
>
>There is an alternate method in INSTALL.NOTES.  Basically, you don't need
>to fdisk the mbr for a valid one to be written -- you just have to invalidate
>it.  This can be accomplished with either of the following:
>
>	1)	low-level format the disk.

Yeah, I could throw my 486 into the Pacific too!  Get a grip Mr. Wizard of 
Earth C.  That's like saying "The operation was a success, even though 
the patient died."  I've got 150 megabytes in my OS/2 partition.  My idea 
of a good time isn't to spend 45 minutes low level formatting my disk, 
then another hour to reinstall OS/2, then another half hour to restore 
from backups.  Oh, and by the way, I'd still need DOS to low-level format 
my disk!

>	2)	boot dist.fs or fixit.fs and type dd if=/386bsd of=/dev/wd0a

And where does that leave me?  Do I still need a DOS disk after doing 
that to fix up my now invalidated master boot record?  I bet I do!

>1)	Frankly, you are lucky that the people doing research using 386BSD
>	are willing to share it with you before it's commercial quality,
>	assuming that that will ever be the case.

What kind of @#$%^& is that.  I don't run around saying "You're lucky
I did this", for the things I've placed in the freely redistributable 
domain.  I hope you're not using Xaw3d!  You're name isn't Jolitz, or 
Torvalds, or even Stallman; just where do you get off telling me I'm 
lucky?


Now that I have that off my chest...  I apologize to the rest of the world
for venting my spleen in public like this.

-- 

Kaleb Keithley                                kaleb@devvax.jpl.nasa.gov