In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Jon Steel wrote: > > I have gotten this to work with the use of a file to pass information > between boots, but that is not an ideal solution. What I really want is > either a way to pass a parameter to the BIOS so that it can pass it to > boot upon restarting, or a way to reload the boot loader into memory and > then execute it.
This is not really possible on the PC architecture. The only way to currently do this is to hack things. Either by putting some stuff into RAM, with checksums and all, and have /boot search for it, and if it find it, execute it. This may or may not work. Some BIOS clear memory on reboot, others don't. Another way is to do some hacking to the "unused" parts of the NVRAM on PCs, and check for that in /boot again, modifying the boot process as you want. > It would even be fine to use another operating system on the first boot. > So it boots up into say Gentoo, and then when Im done with that, I want > to load OpenBSD. If that is the case, run vmware with a windows/linux host. You can then boot different "root" disks for example. > Does anybody have an idea how I can approach this? Bug Dell and other big consortium PC makers to have a BIOS API defined to store things and retrieve things from NVRAM. Hell to document what the BIOS will use to configure console redirection, boot ordering, etc, so that we can store and use the information in a compatible manner from userland. Oh, while you're at it, have them define a simple way to do a putc(3) and getc(3) through the bios as well (from 16-bit and 32-bit applications), that will respect console redirections of course. Lalalaa, -- [100~Plax]sb16i0A2172656B63616820636420726568746F6E61207473754A[dZ1!=b]salax
