MaKe Boot Manager PARTition (MKBMPART)

MaKe BooT Boot Manager PARTition (MKBMPART) Release Notes Beta 1.10 24 August 1994 (c) Copyright David G. Miller (This is an unpublished work) The files includes in this set constitute Beta release 1.10 of the MaKe Boot Manager PARTition (MKBMPART) program. This initial release is fully func- tional although some ease of use enhancements are planned and may be imple- mented depending on how the initial version is received. The files included in this file set are: MKBMPART.EXE - The program executable. RMBMPART.EXE - A program that removes a Boot Manager partition created by MKBMPART. Note: this program CAN NOT be used to remove a Boot Manager partition NOT created by MKBMPART. PART_SEL.HLP - Help file for selecting a partition to be modified to allow MKBMPART to install the Boot Manager program. STRATEGY.HLP - Help file for selecting a Boot Manager partition creation strategy. MKBMPART.WRI - The MKBMPART user manual in Microsoft's Write Format. I'm a firm believer in the use of different fonts and type faces to emphasize or call attention to particular points in a document. I'm assuming that most people who will be interested in this program have access to the Windows Write mini-application. If you would like the Users Manual in a different format, please contact me by e-mail. MKBMPART.TXT - The MKBMPART user manual as plain ASCII text. This file is suitable for printing at ten (10) characters per inch and sixty lines per page. README.1st - These release notes. This program is copyrighted by the author as an unpublished work (also known as a work in progress). The final version resulting from beta testing will be copyrighted as a published work. Please do not redistribute the beta version of this program to other Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). This will only have the affect of making copies of the program that have not had the benefit of full beta testing available to possibly unsuspecting users. If you choose to participate in the beta testing of MKBMPART, I can offer the following advice based on my experience during the development and alpha testing of the program: o MKBMPART was designed to work with the version of FDISK.COM shipped by IBM as part of the OS/2 2.1 General Availablility (GA) distribu- tion. This file's size is 105,399 bytes and is dated 4-29-93. If you do not have access to this version of OS/2's FDISK, please let me know. o Back up any programs or data that can not be readily reinstalled or retrieved from an existing back up. o If you have access to a recent version of the Norton Utilities or similar program that can be used to create a "rescue" diskette, create such a disk (e.g., a bootable floppy with a variety of hard disk repair tools and an image of the disk's partition tables and boot records). At a minimum, make sure you have a bootable floppy with FDISK.EXE and FORMAT.COM. o Both MKBMPART and RMBMPART require that the system they are running on be rebooted after they have made their changes. Because of this they should not be run in a window under either Windows or OS/2. o If things go wrong, try running RMBMPART before turning to other possibilities for restoring your system. During testing, several bugs that appeared to have thoroughly messed up the system were un- coverred. Their impact was repaired by simply running RMBMPART. o The previous hint implies that putting RMBMPART on a floppy is a good idea and relying on it still being accessible on the hard disk you want to install Boot Manager on isn't. o If you use the same floppy to save the system image for several dif- ferent systems, only the last system's image will be accessible since the file that contains this information will be overwritten at each succeeding use of the floppy. A possible enhancement to the program is to allow mutiple system images to be stored and ident- ified. This feature has not yet been implemented. o Norton Disk Doctor will generally report that a Boot Manager parti- tion created using the aggressive strategy is invalid. Its lying. By the time it runs the copy of Boot Manager its complaining about has already successfully executed. o Read the users manual. (Please!!! I need feed back on the Users Man- ual and these release notes too for that matter). o Tell me what happenned when you used MKBMPART. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via e-mail at: Compuserve: 72040,1017 Delphi: MILLER2615 Prodigy: CGVD94A Changes Since 1.00 This beta release of MKBMPART.EXE corrects a problem found during the testing of the 1.0 beta. MKBMPART would erroneously not identify all of the parti- tions defined if the partition table was not dense. That is, if there were unused partition table entries between valid entries. This defficiency has been corrected in this release. The documentation has been enhanced to add a list of the possible error mes- sages along with an explanation of each message. Known Defficiencies As of the release of Beta 1.1 of MKBMPART the following defficiency is known to exist: One beta tester reported that MKBMPART.EXE beta 1.00 erroneously reported that his system had only one FAT and that it was therefore unable to operate on his system. I investigated this problem to the extent of configuring my test system to match the logical definition of his system. I was unable to duplicate the problem on my test system. The beta tester reporting this problem is using an IDE drive with more that 1024 cylinders and a translating controller. I do not have a system with this type of hardware although my experience on my development system (520 MB Fujitsu SCSI hard disk) indicates that the problem is not simply related to the size of the target drive. I would be very interested in hearing back from other users who have systems with large (> 1024 cylinders) IDE drives that utilize translating control- lers.