On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 1:20 AM, Russell Whitaker russ@ashlandhome.net wrote:
On Fri, 12 Sep 2008, Joseph Smith wrote:
On Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:24:32 -0400, "Corey Osgood" corey.osgood@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 12:19 AM, Joseph Smith joe@settoplinux.org
wrote:
On Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:13:18 -0400, "Corey Osgood"
wrote:
On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 10:31 PM, Peter Stuge peter@stuge.se wrote:
Joseph Smith wrote: > > So for Linux do you mean reading /etc/fstab to find the /boot label > and going from there???
No, that is a much later problem.
We are at the stage when all we know are physical hard drives, and we want to look up where an operating system is, and how we start it.
The how may be answered by multiboot.
The where is your mission, should you choose to accept it.
Where in this case means which physical drive, which partition and which file.
Look at the different existing solutions for this problem to see if one of them will work for us, or if they can be improved upon to fit.
Alright, this is an entirely honest question, how complex is the mbr? And how standardized is it? What's required to access it? And the big question, would it be possible to create a new mbr that could be easily parsed by FILO, but still compatible with fuctory BIOS, possibly by using a method similar to windows chainloading? Just throwing this out there, no idea if/how it would actually work.
It is pretty darn simple, it tells a few bits about the drive and where
to
find the first boot sector of the Active partition. But it is a 16bit binary blob normally executed in real mode. We could create our own FILO MBR, but I don't know if that would be the right solution eithor....
Why not? If legacy free is the way we're gonna go, why not get rid of the legacy MBR while we're at it?
Hmm. You got me thinking, the gears are turning. We would have to deal with a binary blob though instead a simple text file. pros vs cons?
A while back Seagate announced they are stopping production of the ATA hard drive. In a few short years the MBR will have gone the way of the 5.25 inch floppy. Even now there are some live-cd distros that don't need a hard drive.
I call bullshit. I found one news article on it, not linked to a press release or any substantiating evidence. Can't find a PR on Seagate's website or anywhere else. And I can't honestly imagine that there's so much of a difference between PATA and SATA hard drives that no longer manufacturing PATA drives would have any considerable impact on their bottom line. 5 1/4" drives were around when only geeks and secretaries had PCs, that's just not the case today. If you know where there's an official announcement, please, send me the link.
-Corey