Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Umm. Wait.. Being "allowed" to pick, if I choose to, which OS to boot, 
> without having to fiddle with "active" flags, is a bad thing? 

No, of course not. And both Windows and Linux let you do that, and 
neither lets you conveniently edit the menus of the others.

But being allowed to pick which OS to boot by fiddling with the active 
flags is *also* supported by Windows, but not by Linux.

In other words, the standard MBR says "load the boot sector from the 
active partition."  If this is Windows, Windows reads boot.ini and gives 
you a choice. So it's two steps.

But if (for example) you have the GRUB boot partition, you cannot delete 
the Linux partition and still be able to boot the machine. If you have 
the standard boot partition, you can set a different partition active 
(while you're deleting the Windows partition anyway) and get that OS 
starting up.

> I.e., instead of waiting 5 seconds for Grub/Lilo to time out and 
> autoboot the default, I have to boot all the way into what ever OS is 
> currently "active" before I can tell it I *really* wanted to boot into 
> the other one. WTF?

No, you're misunderstanding. If the standard MBR is there, it'll give 
you the menu configured into whatever OS is on the partition that's 
"active".  If the GRUB MBR is there, it gives you Linux's menu, 
regardless of what's active.

Both Windows and Linux offer boot-time menus for picking which OS you 
want, without having to start up the whole kernel first. Windows *also* 
lets you use someone else's menu if you want to.

And yes, if it's Linux, and you want it to boot a different OS, you have 
to wait to go all the way into Linux before you can change the default 
OS to boot. And once you've done that, you're screwed, because you can 
never boot back into Linux again unless you're sitting at the console. 
So, don't try to switch back and forth remotely, which is what I was 
talking about in the first place.

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

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