On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, Tom Oehser wrote:
> Y'know, you can actually put the boot.b and map on the NT partition,
> instead of the Linux one. Also, the Linux _partition_ and _filesystem_
> can get _way_ hosed and lilo will still work, since it stores the actual
> map of sectors and reads them through the BIOS- lilo doesn't use the
> partition table or the filesystem structure, so as long as the _actual
> disk blocks_ with boot.b (and map, I guess, also) are still where they
> were, lilo will still work. You would probably have to not only delete
> the partition and replace it with something else, but also write files
> that actualluy overwrote that space, before it broke. But, again, there
> is nothing about LILO that requires 'map' and 'boot.b' to be on the
> _linux_ partition- you could put them on a FAT partition, or actually,
> _any_ mounted-under-linux partition- and LILO won't care- since it does
> _not_ use the filesystem to read them at boot time.
Thanks for the tips; however I still would not try to do that (put LILO's
files on the NT partition), since I was told not to interfere with the NT
side (and who knows if they could run a "defrag" some time later on, and
then break lilo).
Think of it this way: a simple mbr can provide the functionality of the
traditional solution for restoring a Windows machine to its Windows-only
state: boot an MSDOS bootdisk with fdisk, run fdisk /MBR.
Come to think of it, who would want that? :-)
Well, seriously now, what this "mbr" proggie can buy you is simply a
bootloader which is OS-independent.
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
