Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!rocky8!cucard!ccnysci!alexis
From: alexis@ccnysci.UUCP (Alexis Rosen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Black apple (problems installing systems)
Message-ID: <940@ccnysci.UUCP>
Date: 21 Oct 88 18:49:54 GMT
References: <1052@microsoft.uucp> <9601@haddock.ima.isc.com> <65200@felix.uucp>
Reply-To: alexis@ccnysci.uucp (Alexis Rosen)
Lines: 29


In article <65200@felix.uucp> kehr@felix.uucp (Shirley Kehr) writes:
>In article <9601@haddock.ima.isc.com> suitti@haddock.ima.isc.com (Steve Uitti) writes:
>>	The moral of the story is that the installer is broken.  Damn
>>shame.  It is very convenient.
>>
>Thanks for the information. That explains why I couldn't revert to system 5.0
>at home (on an upgraded 512 that couldn't handle system 6.0).  But instead of
>erasing the entire hard disk, I just trashed the hybrid system I got by
>attempting to use system 5.0's installer on top of system 6.0.

This is really a shot in the dark, but I wonder if the new boot blocks format
is giving you grief here. When you install 6.0 with the installer, it writes
new boot blocks to the disk. So your disk had new boot blocks. Reinstalling
the old 5.0 might not have reverted the boot blocks, since I don't think that
they were part of the installation script until 6.0 (but I could be mistaken).
If so, you were running a 5.0 machine with 6.0 boot blocks, which may or may
not cause problems (I don't know what's in the new BBs, but they can contain
executable code. Damn. That's another place for a virus to hide...)

When you copy a blessed (i.e., system) folder to a disk, it also copies that
system's boot blocks to the destination disk. That's why copying a 5.0 system
onto your drive cured the problem, I think.

----
Alexis Rosen                       alexis@dasys1.UUCP  or  alexis@ccnysci.UUCP
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