Re: 1FA: problem still in hamm disks
On Sat, Oct 17, 1998 at 09:49:54AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
> Quoting Tom Lees (tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk):
> > While I'm at it, *PLEASE* drop the dependency of lilo on mbr. I don't want
> > a new mbr eg if I want to install LILO to use on a floppy ONLY (I use
> > GRUB on my HD). Change it to Recommends. mbr being a high priority and/or
> > essential (can't remember if it is) should be enough.
>
> Can someone explain what the point of mbr is? Why not just install lilo
> directly to the mbr? (I always go back and do this for security reasons
> anyway: I've disabled floppy boot in the bios, why do I want an mbr
> that re-enables it?)
Wow! Maybe I'm an idiot, but I just _now_ (after literally years of
wondering) realized where that silly 1FA: message was coming from. I had
thought it was some kind of weird debugging feature of some BIOSes!
1FA looks like a hexadecimal number. I know MBR has to be small, but can we
at least put in some commas, eg. "1,F,A:" ?
Furthermore, I think it should be made abundantly clear, somewhere obvious,
that you have to set the active partition when you install Debian. I've
always been a pure-LILO user, and LILO ignores the active setting. Not
understanding mbr, I've always gone through on my Debian systems and changed
lilo to use /dev/hda instead of /dev/hda1, because otherwise my system
wouldn't boot automatically to Linux. I know it's my own sheer
incompetence, but I would have appreciated a warning message about this
somewhere.
Have fun,
Avery
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