On 05-04-2015 09:36, Minas Abrahamyan wrote:
3. This feature is extreamely needed for just any real-life (==real hardware) Reactos tester and developer: see p.2 Plus starting from extended partition will allow to have multiple copies of reactos installations, which is bread and water for testers. The fact this feature is absent just shows where real-life usage by testers of Ros is: just nowhere.
Hi,
The point here is that what is seen in the project regarding testing is that it is supposed to be done in virtual hardware. Some years ago the project supported "make install", which just created the ReactOS folder somewhere in your filesystem, allowing you to copy it to your ROS install partition, effectively supporting a form of "manual" installation. In those times, I used to test the OS in real hardware, something which is much more funny, and much more accurate, than testing it in a virtual "machine".
Since then, it became a bit more complicated to test it on real hardware, because we never know whether the installer is handling partitioning correctly, and one risks screwing the rest of the disk.
Regarding the boot process itself, one can say that "chainloading" towards an logical partition is something largely uncommon and unsupported. Firstly, only traditional PC OSs (Windows, DOS, perhaps OS2?) rely on chainloading to bootstrap, and in those cases (as far as I have tested) the chainloading needs to be done in very specific conditions (correct sector address in CPU register X, etc, way too fragile and non-uniform across OSs) to succeed. Secondly, Linux simply ignores the chainloading idea as a boot method completely. In NTLDR-based kernels, what is done is that the part of the boot process that relies on chainloading (i.e. NTLDR) must be in a primary (and active?) partition, so you still need a primary partition, even if the rest of the OS is in a logical partition.
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