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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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On Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:14:53 -0700, Darren New wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> True, but at the same time, that information being reverse-engineered
>> by Compaq really opened up the PC market;
>
> I think the pheonix bios did more than Compaq did. The hardware was all
> very well documented by IBM before the clones started coming out, as was
> the BIOS. People didn't used to try to hide that sort of thing. :-) IBM
> wanted people building cards for it, just like Apple did for the Apple
> ][.
My recollection was that Compaq was first with the reverse-engineering,
but Wikipedia conflicts with what I recall as well. It may well have
been Phoenix.
>> Which in turn has moved PC sales from a low-volume high-margin sales
>> model to a low-margin high-volume sales model. Seems to have worked
>> out fairly well for most PC manufacturers.
>
> I dunno about that. Worked well for, say, manufacturing plants in China.
> I don't know that it worked well for people actually selling the end
> product.
I used to sell hardware (Amigas were the main machines, but we had some
PC hardware that was sold). The commoditization of PC hardware lowered
the entry level price to where it was affordable for normal people. For
IBM, as I recall, that happened with the early PS/2 models (the price on
the PC/XT/AT as I recall was still relatively high).
>> Eventually, clean room reverse-engineering would expose those internals
>> anyways, and arguably the type of process Compaq followed isn't
>> something IBM could have sued over - the guys developing the Compaq
>> BIOS were working entirely from specs drawn up by the guys who were
>> looking at how the BIOS worked.
>
> Yeah. Except I think you're confusing Phoenix with Compaq. Compaq made
> the hardware. Phoenix cloned the BIOS first. (Unless I'm misremembering
> something.)
That could be it - a combination of what you remember and what I remember
is probably closer to reality. :-)
> And yes, IBM *did* sue over it. That's why Phoenix followed the
> clean-room approach to start with. The original IBMs came with a
> complete commented source listing of the BIOS when you bought them.
> (Well, maybe it was an extra packet, part of the assembler or something,
> but it was an off-the-shelf purchase.)
I know (from reading that Wikipedia article) that Phoenix was concerned
about it - but I don't recall IBM suing over it. But I didn't follow the
legal issues then the way I do now, either.
Jim
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From: Patrick Elliott
Subject: Re: Linux really costs a _lot_ more than $40
Date: 25 Oct 2008 23:38:15
Message: <4903e627@news.povray.org>
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Jim Henderson wrote:
>> If GRUB's boot sector actually loaded the boot sector off the active
>> partition, just like ever other boot sector written in the history of
>> hard drives on IBM computers and their clones, you could remotely switch
>> back and forth by using the same procedure that's worked since day 0 on
>> the IBM AT. Sadly, the Linux developers want to be the only OS that can
>> be booted, so they didn't bother to follow the standard. ;-)
>
> I had thought GRUB on my system here was set up with the MBR, but I was
> in fact mistaken - it's in the root partition instead.
>
> Jim
Its actually a bit complicated. Windows will, if it can't find, or finds
a damaged Boot.ini simply boot the active partition, otherwise it acts
like Grub, and basically gives a menu, which can "default" to a specific
partition. As I understand it, there is no direct way, short of hand
editing, to tell it which one you want "active" as the default, so you
**need** the "boot from the active partition" behavior. lol GRUB.. Well,
either it or LILO, or maybe both, can be set to be either in the MBR or
in the root. I think, either way, they will look at the root to try to
find the menu options to display. Anyone try to delete the menu and see
what happens? It might default to booting the "active" if it can't find
the menu. So, the only real difference would be the redirect to the
linux partition, in the case where its installed there, instead of in
the MBR, presuming it does boot the active in such a case. Its kind of a
toss up then if you think the "Windows" MBR or the Linux MBR behavior
makes more sense.
--
void main () {
If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
if version = "Vista" {
call slow_by_half();
call DRM_everything();
}
call functional_code();
}
else
call crash_windows();
}
<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models,
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> My recollection was that Compaq was first with the reverse-engineering,
> but Wikipedia conflicts with what I recall as well. It may well have
> been Phoenix.
I think Compaq bought the reverse-engineered BIOS from Pheonix. That's
my memory, at least.
> I used to sell hardware (Amigas were the main machines, but we had some
> PC hardware that was sold). The commoditization of PC hardware lowered
> the entry level price to where it was affordable for normal people.
Oh, you're talking about selling end units. I was talking about selling
it OEM. Kind of hard to make a good profit on commodity manufacturing,
is what I meant.
> That could be it - a combination of what you remember and what I remember
> is probably closer to reality. :-)
Yeah. I'm pretty sure my first clone was indeed a Compaq, at least. But
I remember the lawsuits about Phoenix, too.
> I know (from reading that Wikipedia article) that Phoenix was concerned
> about it - but I don't recall IBM suing over it. But I didn't follow the
> legal issues then the way I do now, either.
They did, or at least went far enough into the discovery process to
figure out they'd lose. I actually studied that one in one of my
graduate classes. IANAL.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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Jim Henderson wrote:
>> I'll eat my underwears if they do. :D
> You'll have to video that one. ;-)
In my experience, the proper response is
GIF! GIF! GIF!
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> YaST will let you do this. I was just in there checking it out. :-)
Cool. Perhaps they improved that since I first tried it a couple years
ago. I couldn't imagine nothing would do it. I'm pretty sure the
command-line fdisk on Linux allows it too.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> I'm now wondering if that's the case - if it uses ntfs.sys;
I might have been out of date. Maybe that was ntfs-2g or something. I
just know what I've heard people tell me. My research (as of a day or
two ago) tells me it's actually all native code, unencumbered by IP.
> Well, yes. There was specific boot sector code in the MBR to do that,
Yeah, but every MBR I ever saw does it that way. It used to be the only
way to boot a different OS.
>> Yes, MS's boot sector follows the standard that's been around for a
>> decade longer than Linux has. GRUB's doesn't. What do you think MS is
>> doing wrong here?
>
> My understanding is that the Microsoft MBR (at least as included in
> Vista, possibly with older versions as well) depends on that boot.ini
> file, much as GRUB depends on the files in /boot/grub.
Maybe Vista, since it has a new boot record. I'll play with it to see.
But everything before that, from DOS thru Win95 through XP all just load
the first sector of the active partition and jumps to it. Now, that
said, the first sector of the XP partition relies on NTLDR and boot.ini
being present. But you'd have to work really hard to fit NTFS into 480
bytes, even if only to find boot.ini, you know?
> Thing is, it shouldn't require a change to the active partition list.
It doesn't *require* it. It *allows* it.
> But also, GRUB can be told to change the default for a single boot only -
> at least I seem to recall there's an option to do that.
Again, my Linux sysop knowledge is probably out of date. The version as
of a couple years ago doesn't allow that, and I can't afford to risk
breaking 60 production machines to check if it's better now. :-)
> Installing Linux (at least openSUSE) on a drive with Windows on it, the
> installer will set Windows up as a menu option so you can select either.
> Installing Windows after Linux, though, Windows won't add Linux to the
> boot menu automatically. I guess that's what I was trying to say.
Oh, it's not automated, sure. But it's pretty trivial, compared to a lot
of Linux things. :-) If you wind up installing Windows after Linux, you
probably are smart enough to type the two or three command-line bits it
takes to get the Linux boot sector into Windows.
> I had thought GRUB on my system here was set up with the MBR, but I was
> in fact mistaken - it's in the root partition instead.
I'm not sure what that means. I know *all* of GRUB doesn't fit in the
MBR, any more than NTLDR does. It's just a question of whether GRUB's
MBR does something necessary to make GRUB boot, or whether you can boot
a GRUB partition off someone else's MBR. Right now, my tests (on SuSE
10.2) are telling me GRUB needs GRUB's MBR. It might be better now, or I
might be doing something wrong.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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Jim Henderson wrote:
> I think this is because GRUB is actually a more complex piece of software
> compared to LILO.
Yep.
> That's not how I remember it, but I generally didn't have multiple MS
> OSes installed simultaneously.
Remember that MS was selling Xenix long before Linux was conceived.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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On Sun, 26 Oct 2008 09:39:34 -0700, Darren New wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> My recollection was that Compaq was first with the reverse-engineering,
>> but Wikipedia conflicts with what I recall as well. It may well have
>> been Phoenix.
>
> I think Compaq bought the reverse-engineered BIOS from Pheonix. That's
> my memory, at least.
That could well be. I don't know that I ever heard the specifics beyond
Compaq was involved and it was a clean-room reimplementation.
>> I used to sell hardware (Amigas were the main machines, but we had some
>> PC hardware that was sold). The commoditization of PC hardware lowered
>> the entry level price to where it was affordable for normal people.
>
> Oh, you're talking about selling end units. I was talking about selling
> it OEM. Kind of hard to make a good profit on commodity manufacturing,
> is what I meant.
Yeah, end units is my point. Agree on the profitability on the
components, you've got to sell a lot of them to make money, and that
includes keeping production costs really down.
>> That could be it - a combination of what you remember and what I
>> remember is probably closer to reality. :-)
>
> Yeah. I'm pretty sure my first clone was indeed a Compaq, at least. But
> I remember the lawsuits about Phoenix, too.
Yeah, Compaq did have the first clone - that's probably what's driving my
memory of it.
>> I know (from reading that Wikipedia article) that Phoenix was concerned
>> about it - but I don't recall IBM suing over it. But I didn't follow
>> the legal issues then the way I do now, either.
>
> They did, or at least went far enough into the discovery process to
> figure out they'd lose. I actually studied that one in one of my
> graduate classes. IANAL.
Cool. IAANAL. ;-)
Jim
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On Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:38:15 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>>> If GRUB's boot sector actually loaded the boot sector off the active
>>> partition, just like ever other boot sector written in the history of
>>> hard drives on IBM computers and their clones, you could remotely
>>> switch back and forth by using the same procedure that's worked since
>>> day 0 on the IBM AT. Sadly, the Linux developers want to be the only
>>> OS that can be booted, so they didn't bother to follow the standard.
>>> ;-)
>>
>> I had thought GRUB on my system here was set up with the MBR, but I was
>> in fact mistaken - it's in the root partition instead.
>>
>> Jim
>
> Its actually a bit complicated. Windows will, if it can't find, or finds
> a damaged Boot.ini simply boot the active partition, otherwise it acts
> like Grub, and basically gives a menu, which can "default" to a specific
> partition. As I understand it, there is no direct way, short of hand
> editing, to tell it which one you want "active" as the default, so you
> **need** the "boot from the active partition" behavior. lol GRUB.. Well,
> either it or LILO, or maybe both, can be set to be either in the MBR or
> in the root. I think, either way, they will look at the root to try to
> find the menu options to display. Anyone try to delete the menu and see
> what happens? It might default to booting the "active" if it can't find
> the menu. So, the only real difference would be the redirect to the
> linux partition, in the case where its installed there, instead of in
> the MBR, presuming it does boot the active in such a case. Its kind of a
> toss up then if you think the "Windows" MBR or the Linux MBR behavior
> makes more sense.
Interesting, now I'm going to have to do some playing with Grub (in a VM)
when I have some time. :-)
Jim
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