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Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 19:04:56 -0800 (PST)
From: Don Lewis <truckman@FreeBSD.org>
To: strick@covad.net
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cc: scottl@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: 4.9 is now available
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On 30 Oct, Dan Strick wrote:
> Scott Long wrote:
>>
>> 5.x uses an entirely different mechanism to make the CD bootable.  The
>> mechanism used in 4.x is similar to what Microsoft used for the Windows
>> 95/98 CD's (Emulated El-Torito), while 5.x uses a similar mechanism as
>> Windows 2000/XP (Non-Emulated El-Torito).  Since Microsoft only requires
>> support for the second method in order to award the MS logo, I suspect
>> that support for the first method is starting to die out in mainstream
>> BIOSes.
>
> Some possibly relevant/confirming data points:
>   1) My Win98 CD fails to boot on my new machine.
>   2) My Win98SE CD boots correctly.
>   3) My WinXP CD boots correctly.
> 
> This could prove very inconvenient for a lot of people who are
> now buying new machines and hope to run FreeBSD 4.9 because it
> has better support for modern motherboard devices.  I tested
> 4.9-prerelease support for all of my motherboard devices, but
> it never occurred to me to test the CD bootstrap.

Can older machines boot from Non-Emulated El-Torito CDs?  If not, it
might be nice to be able to generate CDs of either flavor. This would be
painful for FreeBSD CD vendors, though ...