Bug 13332

Summary:	WinNT Soft RAID Incompatibility
Product:	Base System	Reporter:	Rustam Abdullaev <rustam>
Component:	bin	Assignee:	rnordier
Status:	Closed FIXED
Severity:	Affects Only Me
Priority:	Normal
Version:	1.0-RELEASE
Hardware:	Any
OS:	Any

Description Rustam Abdullaev 1999-08-23 16:00:00 UTC

 Submitter-Id:   current-users
 Originator:     Rustam Abdullaev
 Organization:   EurAsia Netways ISP
 Confidential:   no
 Synopsis:       FreeBSD' boot0 erases Windows NT Stripe Set Info from MBR
 Severity:       non-critical
 Priority:       medium
 Category:       i386
 Release:        FreeBSD 3.2-STABLE i386
 Class:          sw-bug
 Environment: 
 	2 physical hard drives with a stripe-set partition on each of them.
 	First drive also has free space, where I have installed FreeBSD.
 
 Description: 
 	Windows NT 4.0 and later uses some bytes in Master Boot Record
 	(boot0) to store stripe set ID. As I've found out, these bytes
 	located at offset 0x188..0x18b, just before the partition
 	table. FreeBSD's boot record uses all the bytes up to 0x18b,
 	what overlaps NT data.
 
 How-To-Repeat: 
 	Install FreeBSD (version isnt relevant) on machine with windows NT
 	soft RAID.
 
 Fix: 
 	Shrink the boot0 code to fit into 0x188 bytes. Maybe NT uses
 	more bytes (even before 0x188) but I don't know when.

Comment 1 Sheldon Hearn freebsd_committer

1999-08-24 11:00:10 UTC

Responsible Changed
From-To: gnats-admin->rnordier

Comment 2 rnordier freebsd_committer

1999-08-24 23:04:08 UTC

State Changed
From-To: open->closed

The FreeBSD boot manager is compatible with Windows only to the extent 
that Windows is (broadly) compatible with MS-DOS.  There are actually 
a number of Windows "features" we don't adequately support (and can't 
support in 446 bytes), eg. LBA partition types.  As it is not feasible 
to reduce the size of boot0, this is probably a clear case for using 
some commercial boot manager, if you have to co-exist with Windows.