Hi all,
In Debian there's a little known boot-loader that complements lilo, and
it's called "mbr". It consists only of these two files:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 512 Mar 3 19:33 /boot/mbr.b
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 12700 Mar 3 19:33 /sbin/install-mbr
plus a man-page for install-mbr. It might be present in other
distributions, I don't know.
This bootloader is a MS-DOS-like MBR, a very tiny program (it has to be
less than 446 bytes!) that sits in the MBR of the harddisk and boots the
first "active" partition it finds. But it's far more flexible than
MSDOS' mbr, because it can be configured to show a menu when holding the
shift key down at boot-up, and choose to boot from any of the 4 main
partitions (or even floppy, bypassing the BIOS protection--you might want
to disable this).
The rationale for having this _besides_ LILO is that it offers more
flexibility in some situations, namely when you have more than one OS on
the same disk. This was discussed on the Debian mailing lists, and I can
dig the reference if anyone is interested. The upshot is more or less the
following: LILO (on the MBR) will fail if your Linux partition that hosts
/boot gets destroyed; mbr is completely autonomous.
So I just thought I would call your attention to this and see if you think
this could be a valuable addition to tomsrtbt. Maybe not? But just look
at the size!
Cheers,
Jose
--
Jose L Marin [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept of Mathematics [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Heriot-Watt University
Edinburgh EH14 4AS, U.K.
Phone: +44 131 451 3893
Fax: +44 131 451 3249
