Some senseless babbling from Daniela Engert to Mike Ruskai
on 11-18-99  18:25 about Dos C drive...

 DE> Hi MIKE!

 DE> Thus quoth MIKE RUSKAI to LINDA PROULX:
 
 MR> There's no such partition status as "installable".  That's just a
 MR> word used by the OS/2 installation program.  What is in fact
 MR> happening when you set a partition as "installable" is nothing.  No
 MR> changes to the partition are made.  Nothing is written to disk. 

 DE> Not true. With Bootmanager installed, each partition *has* a status.
 DE> For logical drives it is stored in the partition table sector at offset
 DE> 18Ah. Bit 2 is the 'installable' state.

I tested this when I wrote the FDISK wrapper, to see what parameters were
being passed.  I dumped the partition table sector before running FDISK
/SI:FS, setting a partition installable, and exiting.  Then I dumped the
partition table sector afterwards.  Not a single bit was changed.  I just
confirmed my original test.  The byte at 0x18A is 0x01 before and after.

The only indication FDISK gave for which drive was set installable was the
exit code.

However, when I set a partition installable that wasn't already bootable,
and adding it to BM's menu during the process, the byte at 0x18A does
acquire a value of 0x05.  However, with the same partition, setting it
bootable first, then installable leaves 0x18A at 0x01.

So, while that bit might be the designed way of indicating an installable
partition, it isn't used in practice.  OS/2 installs without incidident on
drives already set bootable, which don't have that bit modified at all.

Mike Ruskai
thannymeister@yahoo.com


... Cats are not pets; they own the house and let you live there.

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