Re: boot floppies status report
> I take it, what you are referring to as physical partitions is commonly
> called primary partitions, ie, /dev/hda[1-4]? So, essentially this
> scheme is determined by "mbr" only being able to boot primary
> partitions. What is the advantage of have "mbr" vs LILO as a
> _primary_ bootloader (the one living on MBR)?
It's a matter of being "well behaved" - "mbr" is very compatible with
booting schemes of other operating systems (primarily the Microsoft ones,
but others try to be compatible with MS so it's a lowest common denominator).
There have been a lot of people who have had trouble getting Linux to _not_
boot once they have installed it. If you use "mbr", you can set the default
boot partition with the DOS fdisk program. Indeed, if you configure LILO to
live on a partition as I am doing, you can go on using the DOS MBR
instead of our version, and use that to start LILO, and the "activate" command
on Linux will communicate correctly with the DOS MBR.
> I am using OS/2's BootManager [...]
> I have my root as /dev/hdb1, however if I put lilo there,
> BootManager refuses to recognize the partition as bootable,
> so I set up LILO on /dev/hdb5.
I'd be interested in hearing more about this. My assumption was that the
OS/2 Boot Manager would correctly chain to a LILO partition boot block.
> My only suggestion would be to have an option to put LILO on root partition
> [even if it is a logical one].
It will be installed on the partition even if it is a logical one. It just
won't work with "mbr" that way, so you'll need the boot floppy until you set
up someting more sophisticated. My rationale is that you would not place
your root on a logical partition unless you have a primary OS that is something
other than Debian Linux.
Thanks
Bruce
--
Bruce Perens <Bruce@Pixar.com> A campaigner for Clinton and against Censorship.
Toy Story: $183M and counting. At $184M it will beat the #1 movie of 1995.
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