Dell S2D partition woes

[D J Hawkey Jr]

On Feb 05, at 01:35 PM, Peter Radcliffe wrote:
> 
> All the laptop save to disk BIOS stuff I have experience with is
> phoenix bios, I set them up with phdisk.exe from DOS. These have
> always had to be fdisk partition #4. Always. IBM laptops, Sony
> laptops, they've all been the same.

OK, I finally got it working. On this particular machine, a Dell Latitude
CPi D233ST A12, neither lphdisk nor any of the phdisk.exe utilities I
found work.

These utilities expect an S2D slice signature of 0xa0 at the fourth slice,
as you wrote. However, this machine expects an S2D slice signature of 0x84,
as created by Dell's mks2d utility (specifically, DE987901 'mks2d -F'). It
put the S2D slice at what I assume is the first open table entry (the
second one, in my case).

I haven't experimented with moving the S2D slice to another table entry
to see if the BIOS will find it at any entry. All is well just as it is.

For future reference (if that's an appropriate preamble, considering this
machine's age), the existing FreeBSD slice was not harmed, p'raps due to
the "-F" switch? I followed the directions in the supplied readme.s2d
explicitly.

Dave

-- 
  ______________________                         ______________________
  \__________________   \    D. J. HAWKEY JR.   /   __________________/
     \________________/\     hawkeyd at visi.com    /\________________/
                      http://www.visi.com/~hawkeyd/