I have installed FreeDOS 22.08 (interim release) on a ... frankly SMART reporting problematic HD.
My first attempt have failed. I believed, not sure, it was because the disk was not having previously a FATish partition. So I got the first stage where FDISK was doing it's job (in english... where I was installing in french... but that's been discussed at last get-together)... so it formatted it (but now I realized without doing an MBR) ... then rebooted. So then the installer asked me if it should overwrite the MBR... and I thought to myself, let's try answer no here. And indeed it did not boot after end of installation. To the installer credit, the installer seems to have detected and proposed to type some command to create MBR... but the french translation was quite bad, like "'est pas" rather than "n'est pas" and other stuff... that I did not time to read because the installer removed it after about 3 or 5 secs and decided to continue. It had seems easier to me to just reinstall (and this time choose to overwrite MBR) rather to try to install MBR on hard disk (I expect less technical encline people will do the same). I understand the hesitation to remove previous boot loader... but I believe it is expected that the MBR will be installed unless the user protest: So I believe installer should ask: "Ok to overwrite boot loader (MBR)? (Y/n)" where yes is the default. I write this and realize that it is about what we do now... but the term "overwrite" is kind of frightening... and kind of suppose there is one.... and it may not have. Thinking... feeling we discussed that in the past (unsure)... Proposition: If MBR have valid signature then ask if you want to force an overwrite (defaulting to not)... else "No boot sector present, OK to write one? (Y/n)" defaulting to yes. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
