From rjm@swift.eng.ox.ac.uk Tue Mar 7 15:13:34 1995 Newsgroups: ox.os.linux,comp.os.linux.setup Path: umd5.umd.edu!hecate.umd.edu!haven.umd.edu!news.umbc.edu!eff!news.duke.edu!news.mathworks.com!udel!gatech!swrinde!pipex!uknet!comlab.ox.ac.uk!rjm From: rjm@swift.eng.ox.ac.uk (Robert Manners) Subject: Bill Gates ate my system ... Message-ID: Followup-To: comp.os.linux.setup Organization: Oxford University Engineering Department Date: 02 Mar 1995 11:28:42 GMT Lines: 53 Microsoft Corp., concerned by the growing popularity of the free 32-bit operating system for Intel systems, Linux, has employed a number of top programmers from the underground world of virus development. Bill Gates stated yesterday: "World domination, fast -- it's either us or Linus". Mr. Torvalds was unavailable for comment ... [...] Yesterday I decided to upgrade MSDOS (my games partition :-) to version 6.2. Out came my (original) MSDOS installation disks. I booted DOS and ran the setup program. It said "MSDOS is already installed on this system; this program may only be used for new installations. Please obtain the correct upgrade disk set." Undeterred, I booted my trusty Linux and backed-up my MSDOS partition (using tar) onto an ext2 filesystem. The booted DOS again and ran fdisk to remove the DOS partition - it refused. Booted Linux and used Linux fdisk ... it worked. Now the time came to reboot from the DOS 6.2 install disks to install DOS. This time it worked like a dream. Without asking any annoying questions, such as which drive and which partition to install on, and without any irritating "Are you sure?" type messages, it proceeded with "Formatting drive C:" Unfortunately, Microsoft's idea of drive C was my entire partitioned IDE drive, full of Linux partitions... Boot from Linux boot floppy .... Everything was lost except the root filesystem, which I was able to reinstate with some crafty use of fdisk. Fortunately, I had a relatively recent backup of everything ... Moral: never use a Microsoft product ... even for running Doom under. BTW, to actually install MSDOS, in the correct place it was necessary to escape from the DOS setup program, FORMAT C:, SYS C: (checking that C: was this time the correct drive ...) The had to manually, one by one, expand every compressed file on the installation floppies to the new DOS partition. MS uses an amazingly braindead decompression routine, EXPAND.EXE, which must be run one file at a time and must be told the file name to expand to for every one ... yawn. My system had DOS on /dev/hdb which is fine when booting with LILO. Unfortunately, MS setup applications don't seem to like installing on the second hard drive ... yuk. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Manners Osney Laboratory rjm@swift.eng.ox.ac.uk Dept of Engineering Science University of Oxford x 162 Try: html://swift.eng.ox.ac.uk Linux - the only choice --------------------------------------------------------------------------------