# 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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H: second primary partition on second HD
I: CD ROM
I am not aware of an easy way to change this scheme. In particular you
can not assign an arbitrary drive letter to a partition. You can however
influence the ordering by changing a primary partition into an extended one.
For Linux users:
The possible change of the location of the DOS paritition in the partition
table also means that the device number of the DOS partition under Linux may
change (e.g. /dev/hda3 may become /dev/hda1). Any existing Linux partitions
will not change, so that you will have no trouble booting. You just need to
edit your /etc/fstab file if you mount your DOS partition on bootup.
6. Use with a multitasking OS
You should not use FIPS in multitasking environments like OS/2, Desqview,
Windows, Novell Task Manager or the Linux DOS Emulator. These systems might
still write to the disk after FIPS has changed the hard disk structure,
which may result in corrupting the disk. This is not necessarily so, I'd
suppose that in most cases it would work nevertheless. But since safety is my
first concern with FIPS, I would recommend booting from a DOS boot disk and
then running FIPS, that should be safe.
In version 1.0 I added some code by Dave McCaldon to detect Windows and
Desqview (thanks, Dave!). OS/2 and Novell Task Manager are not yet detected.
I had to remove the code for detecting the Linux DOS emulator because it
caused a hangup on many machines.
7. Using FIPS
If you have prepared a bootable floppy disk as described in section 5,
boot from it now.
Important! Make sure not to have a disk cache program like Smartdrive
running. It has been reported that in some cases the changes FIPS made
were only written to the disk in part, which resulted in hard disk
corruption later. I think this may be caused by the use of Smartdrive,
which in the default configuration delays the disk writes for some seconds.
If you reboot too fast, some of the changes may be lost.
You start FIPS by typing FIPS at the DOS prompt, followed by <ENTER>.
You may exit from the program at any time by pressing <CTRL-C>.
FIPS will first try to detect under which OS it is running. If it is
Windows or Desqview, it will complain and tell you to boot from a floppy
disk. You can proceed nevertheless, but this is at your own risk (see
section 8).
Then FIPS will detect your hard disks, if you have more than one, it will
ask you which one you want to work on.
In previous releases, FIPS failed to detect the correct number of hard disks
with some BIOSes (esp. in Gateway Pentium machines). I hope to have corrected
this. If FIPS fails to detect the correct number of disks, please let me
know. In the meantime you may use the '-n' switch to select the drive
by hand (see below).

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