*BSD News Article 27793


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From: kenh@wrl.epi.com (Ken Hornstein)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Help! I cannot use os-bs on 1.7 Gig drive.
Date: 23 Feb 1994 16:48:49 -0500
Organization: Entropic Research Laboratory, Washington DC
Lines: 25
Message-ID: <2kgj01$14p@sbus.entropic.com>
References: <klee.760727150@imagen> <klee.760995005@imagen> <2k5a6j$1lb@brachio.zrz.tu-berlin.de> <2kg7ar$jua@hrd769.brooks.af.mil>
Reply-To: kenh@wrl.epi.com
NNTP-Posting-Host: sbus.entropic.com

In article <2kg7ar$jua@hrd769.brooks.af.mil>,
Dave Burgess <burgess@hrd769.brooks.af.mil> wrote:
>I upgraded my DOS partition last night to 6.2  I then rebooted, and got ready
>to press '2' to boot NetBSD.  It went straight into DOS.
>
>No Problem, says I.  I will rerun OS-BS and reload the MBR.
>
>I kept getting a divide overflow error.  Apparently there is a change in the
>6.2 boot block that does not work with my older version of os-bs.
>
>I then worked a little DOS magic and got the 6.0 boot block back onto the disk.
>I reran os-bs and the new boot block worked just fine.

Heh, I did the exact same thing, and the same thing happened :-)  I think your
conclusion is a bit incorrect, tho.

I think that the 6.2 upgrade installed a "mini" MBR, while leaving some of the
OS-BS bits intact in the MBR.  What seems to happen is that OS-BS sees these
bits and thinks it's still installed, and procedes to read out information
about itself from the MBR.  It gets a value for some variable that doesn't make
sense, and procedes to freak out.  I fixed this just by doing a FDISK /MBR;
OS-BS doesn't think it's installed anymore, and I re-installed it with no
problems.

--Ken