Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 00:32:35 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.berkeley.edu> Cc: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, chip <chip@wiegand.org>, "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why dual boot? Message-ID: <3C5269A3.2FAB735B@mindspring.com> References: <3C4FBE5C.2AE8C65@mindspring.com> <20020123114658.A514@lpt.ens.fr> <20020123223104.SM01952@there> <3C4FBE5C.2AE8C65@mindspring.com> <4.3.2.7.2.20020124213809.00e6e5d0@localhost> <20020125131659.GB7374@hades.hell.gr> <3C51CD33.4E69B204@mindspring.com> <20020125143213.A70659@HAL9000.wox.org> <3C51E7ED.25FF34BA@mindspring.com> <20020125190153.A71616@HAL9000.wox.org>
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David Schultz wrote: > Sure, > it would be nice if the installer could resize partitions and do > everything for you, but that seems a long way off. Effort might be > better spent trying to get it to work right in situations such as the > one you recently experienced, under the assumption that the user has > left sufficient space for another OS. Or is it the case that XP > greedily gobbles up the entire disk? I (thankfully) haven't tried it > yet, but that sounds like a M$ thing to do. The vendor sets up the Windows XP preinstalled on the system. The preinstall uses all the disk space, because there's no reason not to with the XP FS (NTFS). The "rescue" disk uses "Norton Ghost" to overwrite the entire drive with a new image that has XP installed this way. The reason for "Norton Ghost" is that there are not really any tools other than Windows or Microsoft that can do the writes to an NTFS, so they write the raw disk instead of the FS. If you're interested: the !@#$@%! "Norton Ghost" just writes the disk, without writing the partition table, unless the partition table isn't there already. > If all of the extra things the installer does were failproof, then > this wouldn't be as much of an issue. Nonetheless, installation and > configuration ought to be separate. The installer need only copy the > files for the base distribution, and perhaps allow the user to set the > initial root password. Everything else can be dealt with after > booting the newly-installed OS. Windows deals with this by having a "RunServicesOnce" registry key, which FreeBSD doesn't have. It also has video drivers that work with the minimum configuration for the video hardware you have, using the BIOS to set the video modes so as to avoid having to screw around with monitor and other settings (it just works). Then Windows boots to a "single user who is assumed to be logged in" mode, and doesn't require authentication unless you tell it to, and recovers with timers from other than default screen settings that don't work. Say what you will about them, but they know how to do productization of code. > > This is close to what you'd need, but it can't resize or > > create XP partitions. This is mostly an NTFS issue, that > > has to do with writing the code. > > > > It's actually fairly easy to do this right > > Great! When will you have it done? :P Dunno; when will FreeBSD do VOP_ABORTOP correctly so that an in progress log operation can be aborted? -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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