Bluescreen reboot with cygwin/W2K

[Charles Wilson <cwilson at ece dot gatech dot edu>]

Okay, first: the circumstances under which this error occured are 
unusual.  But still, it's a problem...(I hope this message isn't too 
much of a McNulty...)

1) Power fluctuations on friday killed my NT4.0sp6 system -- especially 
after I restored the SAM from an emergency rescue disk created pre-sp3. 
  Oops.

2) So, I *wiped* the drive, and installed W2K instead.  My cygwin 
installation was on a separate, NTFS drive.  I did not 
reformat/reinstall cygwin (at first).

3) After resurrecting my machine as W2K, I reinstalled the 
cygwin-1.3.3-2 package only -- that way, I figured, setup would fixup 
the registry entries in my new (clean) W2K registry.  It did.

4) I noticed several problems with symlinks in my (otherwise) untouched 
cygwin installation.  They showed up as regular files, not symlinks. I 
figured that there was some difference between "old" 
NT-.lnk-style-symlinks and "new" W2K-.lnk-style-symlinks, and thought 
the easiest way to fix this would be to: reinstall ALL packages from my 
local archive.  I deleted /etc/setup/installed.db, and reran setup.

5) This was more-or-less successful.  There were a number of cases where 
setup couldn't replace files (since they were owned by the old 
NT-cwilson, whose SID had no corresponding new W2K user).  I chmod'd and 
chown'd like a maddog, and eventually got things fixed.

6) Then, I realized that my passwd and group files (from the old NT 
system) were probably wrong.  I successfully fixed the passwd file -- by 
dumb luck:

(Note: CYGWIN=ntsec)
mkpasswd -l > /etc/passwd -- permission denied.
mkpasswd -l > /c/passwd (succeeded, C: is a FAT drive)
Using Explorer, I copied C:\passwd to D:\cygwin\etc\passwd

Everything is fine.

mkgroup -l > /etc/group -- permission denied
rm /etc/group
mkgroup -l > /etc/group
  ---> Immediate bluescreen, with an automatic hard reboot before I 
could read the text.

this is repeatable.  Of course, I can still do:
mkgroup -l > /c/group
Using explorer, Copy C:\group to D:\cygwin\etc\group

And then all is well.

I *think* I see why windows/cygwin becomes confused -- race condition, 
CYGWIN=ntsec, no /etc/group file, creating /etc/group file....

But that should never cause a hard reboot, should it?

--Chuck


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