# Vault 7: Projects

This publication series is about specific projects related to the Vault 7 main publication.

### Dark Matter

# FDOS_1_0_FINAL_freedos_setup_odin_fips

11 May, 1998

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According to the official references, DOS can only have one primary
partition. All DOS versions (at least from v5.0 on) will happily work with
multiple primary partitions, but this is an 'undocumented feature'. If
you want to follow the official rules, you can delete the new partition with
fdisk and create an extended partition in its place.
There are reasons for having multiple primary partitions, among them the
possibility to boot from different partitions by changing the active par-
tition with fdisk.
Known problems with multiple primary partitions are:
- If you accidentally delete one primary partition with fdisk, you can not
easily recreate it, since fdisk will refuse to. There may be other fdisk
programs around that work, and if all else fails you can boot from a
Linux boot disk to run Linux' fdisk, but it is always a hassle.
- There exist some software packages that work with the partition table and
which may be confused by multiple primary partitions. Among them was SFS,
the 'Secure file system' by Peter Gutmann. I think Peter has made a change
to his program to accept some unusual configuration, but there may exist
other software packages that will have problems.
3. Safety
FIPS was specifically designed to provide a maximum of safety. On startup
it checks the Partition Table, Boot Sector and FAT for any inconsistencies.
If it finds anything suspicious, it will tell you so. If there are errors,
FIPS will not proceed.
You have the possibility to write backup copies of your root and boot sector
to a floppy disk before proceeding. If something goes wrong, you may restore
these with the program 'restorrb.exe' (see section 5). I strongly recommend
making use of this feature. It will also enable you to reverse the partition
split afterwards, so it might be a good idea to save the root/boot sector
image in a safe place.
FIPS checks for free space on the partition and will let you choose the
new start cylinder accordingly.
After having calculated the new partition table and boot sector, FIPS will
check everything again, so that possible bugs in the calculation may be
detected. Only if everything is ok, FIPS will ask for permission to write
the new root and boot sector.
4. Restrictions
FIPS will only work with Hard Disk BIOSes that use interrupt 13h for low
level harddisk access. This is true for almost all PCs. I have received
a report that an older Adaptec SCSI controller had a software driver
that worked on a higher level. In this case you can only hope to get a
new driver from Adaptec. This is no problem any more for all newer
Adaptecs (I personally use one).
FIPS will only work on disks with a sector size of 512 bytes.
It seems that DOS is prepared to deal with different sector sizes, but
so far I have never seen this.
FIPS will not split partitions with 12 bit FATs (you would not want to split

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