From: almesber@nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch (Werner Almesberger) Subject: Re: Hard drive booting with two drives? ?: Date: 29 Jun 1992 21:00:46 GMT
In article <1992Jun28.154359.8725@sinkhole.unf.edu> jdough@unf6.unf.edu (Joseph Dougherty) writes:
> I'd like to set up my system to do the same thing (generally),
> something that would allow me to select which drive I could boot to at
> start-up.
A future version of LILO will have such a feature. The installer will be
able to build a combined image consisting of a second stage loader and
any other boot sector. If this image gets booted, the second stage loader
will set up the registers properly, mess with BIOS vectors if needed and
move and start the other boot sector. (It has already been loaded by the
primary boot loader.)
I currently have a second stage loader that simply moves the second boot
sector and starts it. I can boot MS-DOS from floppy with it ;-) This
uses the feature that each sector of a boot image can be on a different
device or partition.
So you can install LILO as your partition loader (it works - I've just
done it and didn't need my disaster recovery disk :-), define some
Linux images plus one (or more) combined images that boot something
else - possibly from a different disk.
> I've also seen mail and news about Linus extending the code for
> long filenames...which I understand would require setting the whole hard-
> drive boot procedure all over again? Is this factual?
It depends. Shoelace will certainly stop working as soon as the root
file system is of any other type than "minix". BOOTLIN (very elegant
solution, by the way) and LILO don't depend on the file system and will
continue to work.
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, ETH Zuerich, CH almesber@nessie.cs.id.ethz.ch / / IFW A44 Tel. +41 1 254 7213 almesberger@rzvax.ethz.ch / /_BITNET:_ALMESBER@CZHETH5A__HEPNET/CHADNET:_[20579::]57414::ALMESBERGER_/