On Mon, 21 Jun 1999 14:28:54 -0500 (CDT), Brad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, Gertjan Klein wrote: > >> Interesting to see that this works for W9x. Just out of curiousity: if >> you go to Control Panel -> System and press the device tab, does it say >> the File System is 32-bit? > >i haven't explicitly checked, but logically it must. Before i installed >Linux the filesystem was FAT32 and i did no reformatting of the windows >partition. If it were not reading a FAT32 filesystem, windows wouldn't >even boot because it could not possibly find any file correctly. Would you mind checking? The information on that tab doesn't actually apply to the filesystem itself, but to the disk I/O driver. W9x says the filesystem is 32 bit if it has completely replaced the BIOS disk drivers with its own, protected mode (32-bit) drivers. Reasons for not doing so include the presence of older, 16-bit drivers in config.sys. W9x does some tests when booting: it reads a couple of sectors through BIOS, and then the same sectors by directly accessing the harddisk. If it encounters differences, (i.e., doesn't get the same sectors back from both reads), it will keep on using the BIOS routines for disk I/O. There are two reasons why W9x could support the drive swapping that LILO does on your system. It could recognise the actual swapping for what it is and implement it in it's own (32-bit) driver. Alternatively, it could see that something is messing with the drive mapping and leave it alone; it would keep on using the BIOS for disk I/O. In the latter case, it would report the filesystem as 16-bit. I'm just curious what it does. Gertjan. -- Gertjan Klein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Boot Control home page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gklein/bcpage.html
