Comments on: Too many hard disks? The smiley face boot crash https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/01/22/too-many-hard-disks-the-smiley-face-boot-crash/ Fun with Virtualization Fri, 26 Jan 2024 21:03:53 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 By: lurker https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/01/22/too-many-hard-disks-the-smiley-face-boot-crash/comment-page-1/#comment-351154 Fri, 26 Jan 2024 21:03:53 +0000 https://virtuallyfun.com/?p=13813#comment-351154 In reply to neozeed.

haa! 🙂

how many IDE devices is enough? 🙂

Win95:

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=368443#p368443

]]> By: neozeed https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/01/22/too-many-hard-disks-the-smiley-face-boot-crash/comment-page-1/#comment-350981 Thu, 25 Jan 2024 14:34:44 +0000 https://virtuallyfun.com/?p=13813#comment-350981 In reply to lurker.

the disk doesn’t have a proper label it’s NO NAME, so yeah looks like I should have figured the worst. At least I dont have anything valuable on there, so I’ll just format it. And see how many hard disks is too much.

]]> By: lurker https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/01/22/too-many-hard-disks-the-smiley-face-boot-crash/comment-page-1/#comment-350833 Wed, 24 Jan 2024 20:02:18 +0000 https://virtuallyfun.com/?p=13813#comment-350833 There was once a Smiley boot sector virus.
I guess your floppy boot sector is just infected.
Dissect that f*cker 🙂

]]> By: raijinkai https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/01/22/too-many-hard-disks-the-smiley-face-boot-crash/comment-page-1/#comment-350551 Mon, 22 Jan 2024 14:58:54 +0000 https://virtuallyfun.com/?p=13813#comment-350551 “Even a Netware server still requires MS-DOS to boot.”
Netware compliant cards had an option in boot rom to enable the boot device to be the only drive discoverable at boot time, with the rest of disks being handled by the OS/manufacturer drivers at later boot stages. That without counting that’s the default and only behavior in many cards where the boot rom built in INT13H extensions can only enumerate the boot device, and you have to load the drivers to see the rest later.
There were also configurations where the server was “IPLed” from a floppy disk. It wasn’t a problem since “automatic updates which required restarting the OS” weren’t a thing back them. You only needed do this once in a while, and unless you needed some fancy drivers loaded from DOS, any “sys A” type dos boot floppy could be used to kickstart the server (the rest of configurations were in Netware itself).

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