Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
John Summerfied wrote:
Howver, this topic's made me think, maybe we have it wrong.
The standard MBR has code that looks for the first active partition and
boots that. A while back, I had cause to examine Darwin's source and ut
contains code (in Turbo Assembler) to do that.
If we (the Linux community) used a compatible MBR, perhaps using the
code from Darwin or FreeDOS, and installed it in /dev/hda (or whatever)
if there's no existing code there, then we'd get along much better with
Windows.
GRUB, LILO or WhatEver would go in the /boot partition.
If Michael reinstalled Windows, then he could go into wherever it is in
Windows he makes some other partition active and reactivate his /boot
partition, boot Linux and add a stanza for Windows.
Thoughts?
Using Windows fdisk, you can only make a primary partition on the
first hard drive active. /boot does not need to be a primary
partition for LILO or Grub to work when the first stage in installed
in the MBR. For that matter, you do not need to create a /boot
partition with a lot of installs.
If you don't have a separate /boot partition, then the /boot partition
is the root partition.
Its true that /boot does not have to be a primary partition, but it
almost always can be.
Even on my laptop that came with a recovery partition, a Windows
primary, an extended and a windows secondary, there was the possibility
to create one more primary partition.
Just to complicate matters, how would you handle the case where
Windows is on the first hard drive, and Linux is on the second
drive? By installing the first stage loader in the MBR, this is
not a problem... I guess you could go into the BIOS and change
the drive that you boot from to handle this, but I can see problems
with a new user trying to do that. Besides, not all BIOS will handle
doing it.
With some care:-)
Booting the second in the BIOS is certainly an option in many cases,
with Grub/lilo having the option to boot the first.
Some distros can resize NTFS; if we could do that and filch a miniscule
amount for a partition on the first drive, then we're home and hosed.
There may be come cases where we need to resort to the existing
behaviour, but having problems with few systems beats having problems
with a few:-)
--
Cheers
John
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