On Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:58:37 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> 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.

I think this is because GRUB is actually a more complex piece of software 
compared to LILO.  LILO also had problems booting a system that was on a 
cylinder greater than 1024 IIRC.

>> 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.

That's not how I remember it, but I generally didn't have multiple MS 
OSes installed simultaneously.

> 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.

Now I could see that with Solaris. :-)

Jim

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