On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, Jose Marin wrote:
> 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.
Errm, if you put lilo into the MBR and make the NT partition the active
one then ALL you have to do if LILO is hosed is a 'doze fdisk /MBR. If
that doesn't work then 'doze is dead too. Of course after killing LILO
with the fdisk you'll have to boot linux off a floppy but then that's no
problem ... you might even want to do that instead of installing LILO in
the first place. (My linux machine doesn't have a bootable hard disk.)
(On the third hand (!?) you can also install LILO onto a floppy)
> 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.
IMO the 446 byte mbr.bin would be nice to have but probably never useful
'cause anything that kills the MBR would probably also destroy the
partition table ... copying the entire of the sector to a floppy, now
that would be useful.
--
Rob. (Robert de Bath <http://poboxes.com/rdebath>)
<rdebath @ poboxes.com> <http://www.cix.co.uk/~mayday>
