Re: debian installation issue
David Wright composed on 2021-07-04 10:29 (UTC-0500):
> On Tue 29 Jun 2021 at 13:26:04 (-0400), Felix Miata wrote:
>> David Wright composed on 2021-06-29 11:16 (UTC-0500):
...
>>> I don't understand the attraction of messing about with boot flags
>>> in order to choose which primary partition to boot from. It seems
>>> inelegant to write to the drive just for that.
...
>> 2-The system was invented over 4 decades ago, before the PC compatible HD
>> partitioning system was upgraded to allow for more than 4 partitions per HD.
> Sorry, what system?
My fallible memory may have mislead. I believe the 66 byte, 4 primary entry
partition table "standard" MBR (system) was pioneered by the IBM PC/AT, which
debuted with DOS 3.0, a good bit less than 4 decades ago. The reference book I had
that spelled such things out never came back from a lend, and it's not proven
worth my time to dig that bit of trivia out of the WWW. I did look on Wikipedia,
but didn't spot a clear answer. The extended type adaptation with logical
partitions arrived with DOS 3.2, which I skipped over to get 3.3 for 3.5" floppy
and Bernoulli Box support.
>> 3-I have yet to intentionally install Grub2 on an MBR system. I use mostly
>> openSUSE's Grub Legacy, which supports ext4 (as long as 64bit is not enabled), on
>> all MBR systems,
> I'm not sure of the relevance of the Grub version, but I assume, from
> your previous post, that Grub is installed in individual partitions,
> not in the MBR/"on the disk".
Grub Legacy maintenance doesn't require much effort or education. I can clone a
partition, then run tune2fs to change UUID and LABEL, and setup Grub Legacy on the
clone, from the same shell session in less than a minute, without need for any
script, .conf file or partition mounting. It needs only a device.map and the Grub
binary. Except when IBM BM is the primary bootloader on a system, I always have
Grub Legacy on a primary partition. Historically, each / partition has it as well,
but with the increasing absence of its availability, many of my installations have
been going without having a bootloader installed by the host OS.
--
Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion,
based on faith, not based on science.
Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!
Felix Miata
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