Subject: Bill Gates ate my system ...

From: [email-masked] (Robert Manners)
Date: 02 Mar 1995 11:28:42 GMT

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.

--

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Robert Manners                                  Osney Laboratory
[email-masked]                          Dept of Engineering Science
                                                University of Oxford
                                                x 162
Try: html://swift.eng.ox.ac.uk                  Linux - the only choice
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