MR> Recall Linda Proulx's posting of her FDISK /QUERY output, from booting
 MR> with floppy disks on a system which doesn't have OS/2 installed yet.
 MR>
 MR> All of the primary partitions were seen and assigned drive letters, in
 MR> order.

By *FDISK*, yes.  But what FDISK displays doesn't necessarily match what OS/2
*does*.  After all, FDISK will display the drive letter assignments as they
would be after changes have been made but before they have been saved to disc. 
 Obviously FDISK isn't querying the operating system for the drive letter
assignments, because it has to cope with the case where the current state of
the partition table in memory doesn't actually match the current state of the
partition table on disc.

FDISK has its own letter assignment code, and I wouldn't be surprised if it
weren't coded *correctly*.  After all, OS/2 FDISK has descended from the DOS
FDISK, albeit indirectly, and as has already been established we know that DOS 
(and so obviously DOS tools such as FDISK) is quite capable of handling
multiple visible primary partitions.

The acid test is to set up multiple visible primary partitions on a hard disc
and see what OS2DASD.DMD does.  From inspection of the code for OS2DASD.DMD,
it won't do the right thing.  But we don't really *need* to do this because
Linda has already done it.  And as she reported, "OS/2 doesn't see my DOS C:
partition".

Many people have told her "Of course it doesn't!  Boot Manager hides all but
one of the primary partitions!", failing, of course, to notice that she
*doesn't actually have* Boot Manager installed.  (There's no room for it, for
one thing.) They've attributed the behaviour that she has observed to
completely the wrong thing.

 MR> While I can't verify it absolutely without running a test that I'm not
 MR> keen to spend the time on, I'd say Boot Manager is the only thing
 MR> standing in the way of OS/2 always recognizing primary partitions in
 MR> that manner. Specifically, when a partition is chosen to boot from on
 MR> a given drive, all other primary partitions are set to invalid types,
 MR> to hide them.

Sadly, the hiding of partitions by multiboot utilities (and Boot Manager is
far from the only utility to operate this way) is but one obstacle to
partitioning one's disc in the way that MS-DOS version 2.0 users used to have
to.  (-:  The problem in OS2DASD.DMD is another.  It is also the more
significant one, since one can always *not use* Boot Manager and switch
operating systems by changing the active flag around if one has multiple
visible primary partitions.  (Again, this is what people in the early days of
DOS used to do.  It is, I suspect, what Linda's guru intended for her to do. 
It's a fair guess that she has some instructions somewhere given to her by her 
guru that describe in detail how to change the active partition using FDISK in 
DOS in order to boot all of these different operating systems.)  But even if
one does so, one will still hit the problem of OS2DASD.DMD not assigning drive 
letters correctly.

 MR> If OS/2 were installed on the first primary partition, with no Boot
 MR> Manager, it'd probably boot and see all drives normally.

No.   This is the bug in OS2DASD.DMD.  It would only see the *first* primary
partition (on each physical disc), and simply ignore the rest.  The irony is
that if OS/2 happened not to be installed in the first primary partition, it
wouldn't even be able to see its own boot volume.

 ¯ JdeBP ®

--- FleetStreet 1.22 NR
143/1