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Re: [MiNT] boot manager



On 5/29/10 8:14 AM, Miro Kropacek wrote:
If yours was designed to allow easy extension, suitable for a
ACP/FireBee, ie it had graphics+mouse (extensions), could boot on any
current OS (TOS included, even if it had to be compiled specifically),
then I think it is definitely needed

The big question is:
  "what are your ideas on functionality"
  "what did you want it to look like"
I think you're missing the point here. My question wasn't about new
XBoot but about boot manager (second stage loader if you want)
handling disk partitions as we can't currently choose from what
partition / OS boot process should continue, as it's hard-wired in
hddriver.sys.

GGN, you've got a point, it's certainly easier to make a few bytes big
boot loader for netbsd from AUTO than create boot manager in MBR for
it :) But anyway, let's hear if anyone else has something to say,
personally I like this as developer, it could be quite fun to code,
especially when making partition scheme compatible with Windows/Linux
(so called MBR partition scheme), in that case you could have Windows,
Linux, TOS, NetBSD/atari and Linux/atari on the same disk and only
thing needed to boot on PC and/or Atari would be to rewrite MBR itself
(to bootstrap each of OS). In case of PC with Lilo or Grub, in case of
Atari with my futuristic boot manager :)

Sounds good but I'm not sure about practical application, especially
in a world with CF<->IDE/SATA adapters...

I'm going out on a limb here and I assume you know about hd-driver's feature to change boot drv on the fly by holding the drive letter. For instance if you wanted to boot off D: you just hold the D key in (or tap it repeatedly anyway). Again, I do see the practical application but hd-driver does offer some of this already.

Thanks,
Mark