(Excerpts from a message dated 11-11-99, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard to
Linda Proulx):

 LP> You'll have to ask him.  if you really want to know I can give you his
 LP> email address. I knew. It has something to do about the weaknesses
 LP> inherent in logical partitions vs primarys. But I can't remember
 LP> right at the moment.

JP>It seems that several people are asking "Why?".  Hand-editing the
  >partition table into a non-standard form using Norton Utilities
  >isn't necessary at all for the sort of setup that you appear to be
  >wanting (DOS, OS/2, and possibly DOS-Windows 9x on a single drive).

JP>The standard configuration, which many people have been using for
  >many years (and which I have even used myself in the early 1990s),
  >is to have: Boot Manager, a single primary partition holding DOS,
  >and OS/2 Warp in a logical drive in an extended partition.  If one
  >wants DOS-Windows 9x later, one installs it on the single primary 
  >partition alongside DOS, since that is the way that it will *try* to
  >install itself, using the standard Microsoft mechanism of playing
  >musical chairs with the config files on that partition once one has
  >booted from it. 

    Back in the old days from 1988 - 1992, many of my friends who worked
at IBM Research were telling me that I should drop DOS (PC-DOS, not
MS-DOS, since I had IBM-built computers) in favor of OS/2 (v 1.x).  I
resisted because I took great pride in understanding the underlying
hardware interfaces, so used direct assembly-language calls in my
programming to reach that hardware instead of using the legitimate DOS
"API" calls.  I didn't want to lose my "guru" status by going to an
operating system that prevented me from using such nonsense :-).

    When I finally switched to OS/2 v 2.0 (in March, 1993), I discovered
that the only DOS programs I had that wouldn't run under OS/2 were the
ones that I had written using those "pedal to the metal" constructs. So,
I rewrote those DOS programs to get rid of that nonsense, and all work
fine today under Warp 4 FixPak 5.

    I am no longer a hardware guru, but I am certainly better off. There
is a moral in this, somewhere :-). 


    Regards,

        --Murray

___
 * MR/2 2.25 #120 * You can lead a user to Docs, but you can't make 'em read.

--- Maximus/2 2.02