Re: Boot Manager

"Teilhard Knight" <teilhk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:3batv4F4oiuq8U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<Vanguard> wrote in message news:_bSdnUktWqwRsc3fRVn-jQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Teilhard Knight" <teilhk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:3balvoF6j63i4U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Could you recommend a good boot manager, please? I mean, to boot several
OSs, but not relying on Lilo. Not Xosl, because it doesn't work together
with a Drive Overlay.


No boot manager that usurps the MBR (master boot record) bootstrap area will cooperate with a drive overlay manager which also usurps the MBR bootstrap area. That is why many utilities will not cooperate with each if they all are trying to overwrite the MBR bootstrap code. You cannot use, for example, Powerquest (now Symantec) BootMagic with Symantec's GoBack because both want to be in the MBR bootstrap area. If you actually need to use the drive overlay manager, you'll need to find a boot manager that does NOT use the MBR bootstrap area (which means it might requires its own partition or share one).

Of the boot managers that I have used, all usurped the MBR bootstrap area so, sorry, I cannot give a suggestion for one that resides wholly within a partition. You might need to consider getting a new motherboard with a newer BIOS that can actually support the large drives that you want to use, or use an IDE controller card that has newer BIOS to support the larger drives.

Xosl is a boot manager which can be installed in a dedicated partition. However, it is not working for me regardless. It tends to get lost if I boot from floppy or CD.

Teilhard.



Some boot managers, like BootMagic, usurp the MBR bootstrap code and put the rest of the program in a partition. You only get 512 bytes per sector, the MBR is sector 0 in track 0 of the first physically BIOS-detected drive, and the MBR includes the partition table and drive signature bytes. The MBR bootstrap program can only be 460 bytes in size. That is damn tiny and just enough to figure out how to read the partition table to determine which one is the primary and active-marked partition to then load into memory the first sector of that partition (i.e., its partition boot sector) to begin loading the operating system. BootMagic puts its tiny bootstrap program in the MBR bootstrap area which then runs the rest of its program from whatever partition in which it got installed. Some boot manager will usurp the rest of the unused track 0 to provide additional space for their code rather than putting it into some partition.

It sounds like XOSL might not use the MBR bootstrap area at all. There wasn't any documentation at its Sourceforge site for me to know how it operates. So my guess is that the standard bootstrap code is used in the MBR (which, in your case, is the drive overlay manager) which loads the program in the boot sector of whichever is currently the active designated primary partition in the partition table in the MBR, which then loads XOSL under whatever file system was used in that partition.

When booting from a floppy or CD, you are NOT using the bootstrap program in the MBR of the hard drive that then loads the boot sector of the active primary partition. You are using the boot program on the floppy or CD instead, if they have one. You said XOSL won't cooperate with using a drive overlay manager and that would only occur if XOSL was attempting to usurpt the MBR bootstrap area where the drive overlay manager already resides. It's been maybe 8 years, or more, since I had to use a drive overlay manager and, at that time, it was for some motherboards that were already 3 years old.

Since it appears that you must use the drive overlay manager to get the full capacity of your hard drive(s) on an old motherboard, and since that only runs from the hard drive's MBR bootstrap area so you can use the partition's that got created under its geometric translation, we are back to:

- Get a new motherboard with a BIOS that handles large drives.
- Get a controller card for your hard drives that has a BIOS to support large drives.
- Use removable drive bays and put a different OS on each swap drive.
- Find a boot manager that NEVER touches the MBR bootstrap area (I don't know of those).

Maybe there are other boot managers that instead usurp the boot sector of the active primary partition listed in the MBR's partition table, or simply loads DOS and then runs the boot manager as an application started by the Run line in config.sys or loaded by autoexec.bat. However, at that point, you could just use FDISK to change which was the active primary partition and reboot to it. Even BootMagic's DOS-mode PQboot can do that (same effect as using FDISK but simpler to use).

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