Oh what a joyous experience I just had, I just need to share it
with you all.  Having run out of room on my current hard disks,
I bought some new ones.  I slide a nice big Maxtor into the chassis,
and boot up with my hot-from-the-drive NetBSD boot disk, and install
NetBSD in about a minute and a half, having told it to leave 600
cylinders of the drive for DOS.  No problem!!!

Then I put in the Dos boot disk.  No joy...not only will it not
install on the IDE drive, it won't even make a boot floppy.  A savvy
friend uses his own boot floppy to come up, run debug, and
CLEAR THE MASTER BOOT RECORD TO ZEROS.  No kidding...Microsoft install
reads an unfamiliar boot record and CRASHES.  That's why we run Unix,
kids.  After this, install comes up, and comments "some or all of the
drive was reserved for MSDOS", and proceeds through all three of the
install floppies, after which I discover it has claimed the whole hard
disk for itself.

No biggie...but be sure, if you want to share a disk like this, to
install MSDOS first, before putting your Unix at risk.

I can't BELIEVE their install program will crash like this...