Date: Thu, 08 Apr 2004 16:40:56 -0700 From: underway@comcast.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: unable to use BOOT EASY to boot linux Message-ID: <1mad1mox6f.d1m@mail.comcast.net> In-Reply-To: <200404071513.37640.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> (Johnson David's message of "Wed, 7 Apr 2004 15:13:37 -0700") References: <20040407212156.31712.qmail@web25001.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> <200404071513.37640.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com>
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Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> writes: > On Wednesday 07 April 2004 02:21 pm, Tadimeti Keshav wrote: >> hi all. >> I added a 2 GB linux disk as a slave and installed >> Mandrake Linux with LILO on the root partition of >> linux. > > So far this is correct. LILO needs to be on the *root* partition. No, it doesn't. It only needs to be on some boot record: the MBR or the BR of one of the 4 primary partitions. It was once common to put it on a small /boot partition in the first 1024 cylinders (no longer necessary), with the Linux root partition above 1024. > The standard boot loader is NOT a boot loader. All it will do is boot > the partition that is marked bootable. You want to choose BootMgr for > each harddrive, if you want to use the FreeBSD boot manager. Please see > the section in the Handbook" 2.5.3 Install a Boot Manager". The IBM/MSFT(?)-standard boot loader *is* a boot loader; just slightly less sophisticated than "Boot Easy", and not interactive. Both load more further bootstrap code to boot one or more OSes (or some program for that matter). I guess it's debatable, depending on definitions, whether the standard boot loader is a boot manager. > It's amazing that they were able to fit a general purpose boot manager > into only 512 bytes! Chapter 7 of the Handbook "The FreeBSD Booting > Process" describes this in excruciating detail. It fits in 447 (=512-1-16*4) bytes, IIRC. Beware that the Handbook's "stage one" is (at least) the third stage in the bootstrap process, counting the BIOS boot code and the MBR boot code.
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