Jim Henderson wrote:
> ntfs-3g can write safely to NTFS partitions.  I almost said it didn't 
> matter, but forgot that with Windows you do have to modify boot.ini for 
> that purpose.

To be clear, you have to modify boot.ini to add a new option to the 
Windows boot menu choice. But you do *NOT* have to modify boot.ini to 
boot something instead of Windows. You just change the active partition. 
You can boot off a MS-DOS floppy and change yourself from booting 
Windows to booting Linux or Solaris or whatever else you might have there.

Unfortunately, since GRUB doesn't follow the rules that have been in 
place for 25+ years, this doesn't work with GRUB. Used to work with 
LILO, but apparently GRUB's per-partition boot loader requires GRUB's 
MBR to work right, according to some informal tests I just did.

> Yeah, it's really kinda - well, expected, I guess - that MS behaves that 
> way about how the system boots.  They want to be the only OS there, 

Um, no. They behave exactly the opposite. MS's boot sector will boot 
whatever partition is marked "active".  Remember that MS has been making 
multiple OSes for a long time. You've always been able to multi-boot off 
MS operating systems.

Solaris was the OS that wiped out your partition table, on the grounds 
that you couldn't possibly want Windows *and* Solaris both. And GRUB is 
apparently incapable of booting from its own partition without the help 
of its own MBR, which doesn't pay any attention to the active flag.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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