Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!jarthur!uunet!mcsun!ukc!yorkohm!minster!pete
From: pete@minster.york.ac.uk
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Hard disk booting
Message-ID: <675874398.11854@minster.york.ac.uk>
Date: 2 Jun 91 14:53:18 GMT
References: <1JUN91133124@vms.huji.ac.il>
Reply-To: pete@SoftEng.UUCP (Pete Fenelon)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England
Lines: 49

In article <1JUN91133124@vms.huji.ac.il> seran@vms.huji.ac.il writes:
>Hi,
> Please tell me if this is a good idea or are there better ones.
>Recently I , in a very tired and uncarring state, put a program in my boot
>drive c: of my hardisk. It was an ACC. When I rebooted the program caused
>the computer to totaly crash. I am using desk manager so I was not too worried
>and went into the ACC selection and unmarked this program. But it did not help.
>The ACC still ran and still crashed the computer. After many hours of working
>and trying to get rid of the program or around it in some way, I gave in to the
>thought that I will have to reformat my hard drive. The next day I came up with
>a simple, obvious idea which saved me. I only formatted drive c:. Then I put
>in C: as a boot drive again and reloaded from my back-up which was almost fully
>entact. 
>
> I avoided losing all 60 megs but I also came up with a diff idea. Why not
>partion the HD so that drive c: is the smallest amount of memory possible.
>make it a boot up drive and stick _only_ desk manager there. Then make a drive
>d: or whatever that will contain all the prg's and acc's that desk manager acceses.
>Then if ever I get a program which kills on booting I can just format drive c:
>and only need to restore desk manager. It sounds good to me, perhaps I am 
>wrong. Any ideas, suggestions, or comments would be appreciated.
>
> Also, what is the procedure of putting dos on the hardisk for pcditto? And
>is there also a way to do the same for aladin?
>
> Thanks,
>    Eran..
>(please answer to my email adress bellow if possible as I cannot read the list
> often)
>
> SERAN@VMS.HUJI.AC.IL

Every time I cock up my boot partition (and it happens frequently; I seem to
attract cruddy software) I just do the obvious -- power the hard disk down,
boot from floppy, switch the drive on when the machine's booted safely (I
use a disk with no ACCs or AUTO programs for ``emergencies'' like this -- it
contains AHDI, Gulam and Disk Doctor) and run AHDI (you may need ICDBOOT or
whatever) from the desktop, use ``Install'' to put C: back on the
desktop, delete whatever's causing me any problems from \ and \auto,
then power up again. Everything works then.

It works for me and is a lot less drastic than formatting...

	Pete Fenelon
--
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