topbanner_forum
  *

avatar image

Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
  • Tuesday March 19, 2024, 6:27 am
  • Proudly celebrating 15+ years online.
  • Donate now to become a lifetime supporting member of the site and get a non-expiring license key for all of our programs.
  • donate

Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.


Messages - wolf.b [ switch to compact view ]

Pages: prev1 [2] 3next
26
Is there an extension?
maybe yes, maybe no.
One of many ways to find out is checking with a different filemanager than explorer. I suggest the DOS prompt like this:
Start>Run>cmd.exe (press enter)
type cd C:\TestCopy (press enter)
type dir myieshortcut.* (press enter)
Look at the output of the dir command.

alternatively you could try and open the file in notepad like this:
Start>Run>cmd.exe (press enter)
type cd C:\TestCopy (press enter)
type notepad myieshortcut (press enter)
if notepad opens an empty file, then your original file has a still hidden extension.

the command for could be what you are looking for:
@echo off
for %%f in (myicon.ico, myieshortcut) do copy C:\TestCopy\%%f C:\TestCopy\datafolder


Please post again if you need more hints or alternatives.

Greeting
Wolf



27
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: November 14, 2007, 09:24 AM »
Hi saikee,

On the VMware side my free version of an installed Linux inside a MS Windows is just a file.  I can't even from one Linux see another guest Linux under the same Host.  If you have done it from an boot up CD that may be something different or you have extra bits and pieces over and above the free VMware server software that I have.
I am not sure if I understand everything here. I have got several VMware versions: Player 1.1, 1.4, 2.0. Also workstation version 5.5 from a German magazine with a special trial period of 6 months. I can tell you that somewhere was an option to mount a physical disk. Here I could choose to mount the entire disk or to select one or several partitions. So with the physical disk mounted and the ubuntu iso mounted, this VM booted from CD and gave me access to my physical ubuntu installation.
I know that this is a mere repeat of my previous post. But given this layout, I wonder what you want to add. Would you like me to try starting a second VM with ubuntu and network them. Or would you be interested to see if I can do two separate installations with lets say xubuntu and kubuntu on the same VM but on different partitions of the virtual hard disk. Or maybe two virtual hard disks. And wheather those virtual installations and the physical installation can all see each other with read/write access. At that point I am lost as I don't know what to do at the bash prompt apart from launching midnight commander to look at the file system.
I can not offer support for anything, but I have time to play around. In case you or anybody feels like asking questions similar to this: Has anybody tried using VMware player version 1.4 to install Puppy Linux on a Virtual disk and get access to something. Or has anybody tried InnoTek VirtualBox 1.5.0_OSE to do something else, ...

I invite everybody to just ask questions like that if you want. This is one of the friendly forums on the net where people meet, who like other people as well, not only computers. I am sure that there are a lot of forum members who have looked into multibooting and/or did experiment with partitioning schemes.

A word on how I regard myself: I'm not an IT professional, Computers are a hobby since the days of Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The only area inside my computer that I know well are the bytes number 447 to 510 of cylinder 0, head 0, sector 1, found on the first physical hard disk.


Greetings
Wolf

28
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: November 13, 2007, 10:27 PM »
Hi saikee,

I probably should start by explaining what I think might have lead to misunderstandings. I was not careful enough to give enough details on what exactly I have done. This is the hopefully better version:

I have installed Windows 98 SE to E:\WINDOWS when asked by the installer where to intall (default C:\WINDOWS). That will put everything that otherwise lands in C:\WINDOWS now on a different partition. The same goes for files and folders in C:\Programme (German version) which will land in E:\Programme. But the files that the installer puts into the root end up in the root of C:. Theses are things like a lot of *.log, setup.1st, bootlog.txt, backups of files that were there origionally like msdos.sys (now called msdos.dos), command.com (now called command.dos) and so on. Most important are the new files io.sys and msdos.sys. These are necessary to launch E:\WINDOWS\win.com. So strictly speaking, the BIOS reads the MBR, the MBR looks for a single primary bootable partition and if successful, it reads the boot sector of that primary partition. That boot sector looks for files called winboot.sys or io.sys in the root of the same primary partition where it (boot sector) came from. In case of certain (default may be OK) configurations of msdos.sys I think there is need for config.sys, command.com or autoexec.bat to be able to continue. Io.sys will find the path to win.com from msdos.sys and Windows will start.

Short: I have been able to start Windows 98 SE (installed on a logical drive that sits in the last 2 GB of a 250 GB hard drive) in an attempt to check if it is possible. But I have used a primary bootable partition with two files C:\io.sys and C:\msdos.sys to achieve that goal.

Shorter: I boot from C: to start Windows on E:.

I don't know if any of my previous posts were misleading in a way that makes it look as I have "booted" from logical drive E: without using any startup files on primary C:.

In my defense I quote my initial post#1 from the start of the thread:
Most (maybe all) OS for PC run well when they are installed on a logical drive and I boot from a matching DOS floppy. So I thought maybe they also run well when booting from a small primary DOS partition

Actually there were a lot more files on C: when I did it. Next experiment was to use a spare primary partition to exclude side effects caused by ntldr loading bootsect.dos (512 bytes) to see if it is still possible. In my case ntldr actually is instructed to load a file called C:\SECTOR\msdos710.bin. I didn't think ntldr would influence the basic possibilities, but I checked anyway. Also I have checked that a floppy with only two files can start this installation on E:. In both cases only two files were able to do it. For completeness let me mention that io.sys is unpatched and original, and this is the content of msdos.sys:
; MSDOS.SYS
; edited by Wolfgang Bernady
; This version is for MS-DOS 7.10 (Windows 98 SE)

[Paths]
WinDir=E:\WINDOWS
WinBootDir=E:\WINDOWS
HostWinBootDrv=E

[Options]
Logo=0
BootSafe=1
DisableLog=1
DoubleBuffer=2
WinVer=4.10.2222

The only DOS version that in my experiments was able to go straight from MBR code to a logical partition was PTS-DOS 32. I think it uses a special IPL inside the MBR to boot DOS from a logical drive, in my case that was E: again. Unfortunately the demo version of PTS-DOS has got a nasty delay of 60 seconds when it boots and I have not felt overly keen on doing much with it. But it surely boots from a logical drive.

Can you verify by booting the last official Dos (6.22?) floppy to see if your fat16 partition, created by Win98E, can be seen by it?
MS DOS 6.22 can not see that particular partition, nor can it see the other partition which was between 12 and 14 GB. Furthermore DOS 6.22 was only able to see my DATA partition (physically first logical drive, sits between 2 and 4 GB, FAT16) after I have changed the 5th byte (partition ID) of the extended partition from 0F hex (Extended LBA) to 05 hex (Extended). Even then it could still not see the 12-14 GB partition nor the 248-250 GB partition (BTW both are type 06 hex FAT16, not type 0E hex). That would have been something. Maybe I could try and use NTFS4DOS to find out what happens then.
 
As for USB pen drives, SD cards, CF cards (I have no other media), I really don't know. But I think you are right that the manufacturers choose FAT16 for compatibility with DOS. This makes me think of a USB format tool, that I have seen recently. It offers FAT, FAT32 and NTFS filesystems for pen drives.

My puzzle is if a MS system can survive as a "stand alone" OS in a logical partition how does it boot itself?  Everything about its MBR say it cannot be done.
Sorry, my mistake. It needs a floppy, CDROM, USB boot stick, bootable SD card, network or a small primary hard disk partition to boot first, as far as I know only PTS-DOS 32 boots itself on a logical drive.

Untested: if all partitions located in front of our logical drive are hidden, and Windows was installed to C: then you can probably do without msdos.sys. I think that the paths will default to C:\WINDOWS. So if I install Windows 98 to C:\WINDOWS (primary partition), and copy all the files to the first visible logical drive, and hide the primary partition, (or just convert the primary partition to a logical drive) then I could have a way to lock the computer by taking the boot floppy out. Actually I can think of ways to do that with Win2000, WinXP as well, maybe even Vista, but I don't have Vista. I'm getting carried away here.

The Microsoft Knowledge Base page is currently not available, I will have to look it up later.



Hi mikiem,

I find it very interesting what you write about multiple Windows installations on the same drive. I have a collection of tools that I keep on D:\Tools32 and with some of them I have *.reg files to quickly reinstall/repair their configuration. One of my reasons to keep OS separate was that I was unable to install Win95 to eg E:\WIN95 with programs in E:\Progs95 and parallel to that install Win98 to E:\WIN98 with programs in E:\Progs98. The installation was possible, but I could not figure out how to separate the according %ProgramFiles% folders. That's why I chickened out and ended up with installing unproblematic tools to D: drive and Office or other stuff installed twice on separate E: partitions. Have you got any hints to offer on how one could force Win98 to create and use a folder named Progs98 instead of Programs? It should be possible, because on my installation it is called Programme (long file name with PROGRA~1 as DOS name).
The tools in D:\Tools32 actually work very well even on BartPE and the reg files offer quick and dirty installation. I guess in your case that would be the same with BartPE. I have only a small number of tools that I use like that: file manager, text and hex editors, and a few tiny apps that require no installation. I find it most interesting to hear that it has worked for you over a long period of time. Years back when I tried multiple OS one the same drive I noticed that some programs, when you install them inside one OS, and execute them inside the other, they seem to "repair their installation" (ie create the missing registry entries) and work well afterwards. Other times, I installed the same program for both OS into the same folder. But eventually I gave up, because I was not comfortable any more. Nowadays where hard disks are large, it matters little, but back then it did hurt to waste so much space.

... according to whatever I've read you shouldn't be able to do either, and that's obviously wrong.
I'm glad to see that I am not alone. I regard my computer as a toy, I take it apart and put it back together again as I please. And when somebody says "You are not supposed to do ..." I find myself quite often in the process of checking what happens, if I don't listen.

I have to add that the ever present threat of "data corruption" or "data loss" is no problem, as I can not loose anything valuable (I backup my files, then backup my backups, then check if all the backups are ok, then I start experimenting). Also I found that the frequent "data losses" that are happening here are no losses at all. I only loose access to files, partitions and so on, because that is what partition hiding is all about. I know what bytes I change in the partition table to hide or delete partitions, and when I change the bytes back these partitions are unhidden or undeleted. The data itself remains untouched.


Greetings
Wolf

29
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: November 12, 2007, 04:43 PM »
Another quick note: Windows 98 SE works when installed in the last 2 GB of a 250 GB HDD. :)
That is a logical drive with FAT16 filesystem.
But it only runs in 16 bit save mode secondary to my motherboard not being old enough. :(

30
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: November 11, 2007, 10:13 PM »
Quick note from inside Ubuntu: the file "/WolfWasHere" exists and its creation does not seem to have caused much damage to the filesystem.

31
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: November 11, 2007, 08:32 PM »
Hi saikee,

I don't know how to put this, so it is probably best to apologize beforehand in case I annoy you: Sorry for my bad attitude, no offense intended. :-[ I just try to get things straight in my mind. And also I like to discuss rather than argue.


... a Bios that will read off the first sector of the first hard disk it is asked to boot.  The Bios goes into the 446th to 51oth byte position to read off the 4 primaries.
I think, the BIOS will read the first sector of the hard disk, if it is asked to boot from it. Agreed. It seems to be ?standard? behavior to put it into RAM at location 0000:7C00. But the BIOS does not show any interest in the partition table (447th to 510th byte of the MBR). It is the Initial Program Loader (IPL = the first 446 bytes of the MBR) that copies the entire MBR (512 bytes =446 bytes IPL + 4*16 bytes partition table + 2 bytes signature) to a ?standard? location in memory (from 0000:7C00 to 0000:0600).


If a partition happens to be fat32 which is supported by virtually all OSes then every OS can read/write its content.
Maybe I have a lot of old hardware with old OS, but I think FAT16 is supported by a lot more OS's than FAT32. Not even Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0 supported FAT32, not to mention MS DOS previous to version 7.1.


fat16 filing system has a maximum address of 4Gb and putting it beyond the first 4Gb area in the hard disk means no OS can access it.
I would like to repeat my statement of reply#6 of this thread:
I have tested my Windows 98 SE again, just to be sure. It is installed on a logical drive. That logical drive is located 12 GB past the start of the drive.
First physical sector = 25,430,958   (Cyl 1,583, Hd 1  , Sect 1)
Last  physical sector = 29,623,859   (Cyl 1,843, Hd 254, Sect 63)
It boots OK.
And I want to add that it is a FAT16 formatted partition. It starts 12 GB past the start of the disk and ends 14 GB past the start of the disk. In case of interest, I can try to copy it to the very end of the hard disk (size is 250 GB or 240 GiB) and see if it is bootable. Actually I am interested myself now, so I will check it out and post the result.


I am aware 256 primaries is no object by putting in a hard disk management layer.
Would you mind very much if I took that technical phrase "hard disk management layer" and use it to describe my batch files? It makes it sound as if I knew what I am talking about.


What is good about installing a Linux as a virtual machine inside a Windows host if that Linux cannot communicate with other Linux partition and read/write information?
I have VMware running on Windows XP. In there I can boot Linux from a CDROM (have not yet installed it to a virtual disk) and I get read/write access to my Ubuntu partition which is installed on a logical drive of my physical hard disk. After finishing this post, I reboot into that Ubuntu installation and post what damage I have done. (I have created an empty file: "/WolfWasHere"). Have I misunderstood that question?


I hope that I don't come across as a smartassed Know-it-all, because I feel that I know much too little about multibooting to be able to give advice or even write tutorials like you have done. I appreciate the way you are sharing your knowledge and I am honored that you read this thread and answer my questions. :)



Greetings
Wolf

32
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: November 10, 2007, 10:41 AM »
I don't own the PC standard but just use it like everybody else.
Yeah, right. Reading your publications I would say: you use it like nobody else.  :up:
But seriously, I am full of admiration for your work. "Der Bootmeister" for president.

Still seriously, if there is such a thing as "the PC standard", where can I read it? I always assumed that the way how CHS values and LBA values are written to the partition table entries are more like a loose convention. I have noticed on many occasions that the partition table (inside the master boot record (MBR)) and more often the extended partition tables (inside the extended partition boot record (EPBR)) written by Ranish Partition Manager (RPM) were declared as errors (partition table error 116, if I remember correctly) by PowerQuest Partition Magic, and PQmagic offered very kindly to correct those errors. Neither with nor without consequent PQmagic correction, have I ever experienced a problem with getting any MS OS to run from logical drive that has an incorrect CHS address in EPBR. Any thoughts on that? My thoughts are these:
  • All tested MS OS don't seem to care about CHS address, but use LBA address instead. Not to care here is meant to say: maybe the OS loader does read CHS address values, but it does not put out a message about them being off the mark.
  • As long as the crucial values are correct, the rest can be ignored or (ab)used otherwise, with no negative consequences. If I regard the boot sequence as a means to the end of having a OS at my command (GUI or CLI), the only negative consequence would be to not have that OS to boss around. Mind you, getting error messages from particular tools that don't like the way other tools or I manage the hard disk is nothing I would call positive consequence, it is merely a nuisance.

If there is a way to get more partitions out in the normal way then I would love to know.
Sorry for this stupid question: is your understanding of "normal way" the same as: only grub build in commands allowed?
Without that limitation I can think of at least one way to get more than 44 logical partitions. I don't want to bore you or the rest of the forum readers (in case there are any left) with lengthy details.
Just for the record: Ranish Partition Manager (shareware) supports a maximum of 32 primary partitions. Trombettworks' system supports as many primary partitions, until I run out of ink or paper (or disk space more likely). I have written for myself a batch that takes over the role of the ink and paper. Currently I juggle with about 50 primary partitions, but I guess the limit is way beyond 256 partitions.

LVM is not universally supported ...
What is LVM, please? Linux Virtual Machine :-* , no, but maybe Linux Volume Manager.
Actually a search came up with What is LVM? Answer: LVM is a Logical Volume Manager for the Linux operating system.


Greetings
Wolf

33
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: November 09, 2007, 10:39 PM »
Hi saikee!

Thanks for your reply. I have found that my initial problems with a GRUB floppy were probably related to buggy BIOS, bad floppy disk, old hardware or some such. The floppy I have created following your walkthrough in the reply#37 works perfectly :) on only one of my laptops, but not on my desktop or inside a VM on that desktop. :( I have found another way here to create a GRUB floppy on a FAT formatted floppy (uses mkfs -t msdos /dev/fd0). That one, funny enough, is the other way round, works on my desktop and inside VM, but not on my laptop. Anyway, I now think that my first attempts were not all that bad, I might have tested that first floppy on the wrong machine. So thanks again for encouraging me to give it another go.

Have you ever tested GRUB4DOS?
What do you think of the possibilities to load disk images into RAM?
Is there a reward for beating your record of getting 44 different bootable Linux distros (or 44 logical drives) onto a single S-ATA disk? Just kidding. Would I be allowed to use workarounds (non-grub methods) to achieve that?


Greetings
Wolf

34
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: November 07, 2007, 08:23 AM »
Hi saikee,

thank you for your links! :Thmbsup:

As it will take me a while to read those threads, I wonder if you could answer a basic question:

Is there a limit on the max number of logical partitions on a single HDD (S-ATA)? I mean, if I have an extended partition with 30,000 cylinders, does that allow 30,000 different logical drives inside? Surely not, but you wrote that the limit of 63 logical drives is not true anymore. I could not find yet the answer, still reading ...

Thanks in advance
Wolf


Edit(1): I guess it is 11?

Edit(2): Would you be kind enough to have a look at Reply#16 of this thread and maybe point me in the right direction to create a GRUB boot floppy. At present I use GRUB4DOS on my active primary partition, but I would appreciate any help.

35
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 28, 2007, 06:21 PM »
would that do the same as
4dos /c del /s/y/z \*.*
does for DOS/Windows?

I guess yes. I have found that trying to get my 2nd monitor involved (which is attached to PCI graphics card, 1st monitor is on onboard graphics card) takes so much longer, but messes up things thoroughly as well. :) I am getting better at doing a fresh reinstall.

36
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 28, 2007, 03:49 PM »
Another one for the record:

I was able to start my new Ubuntu 7.10 using GRUB4DOS. That code from post #30 did the trick on my first attempt. I guess that makes me now a Linux user. What is the quickest way to mess it all up?

37
Thank you for posting the screen shot. It looks very nice. Keep up the good work! :Thmbsup:

38
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 28, 2007, 03:19 PM »
Just for the record:This page How To Multi-Boot Operating Systems is full of useful infos and illustrating pictures.

39
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 28, 2007, 03:01 PM »
Hello Armando,

Yes, if believe that if your hard drive is sata or scsi, then it will be identified as "sda" ...
-Armando

Yes, I have S-ATA drive.

Where do you think can I get the boot sector of that partition.
-wolf.b
What do you mean ? You want to be able to read it? or change where GRUB resides...?
-Armando

Yes, I would like to read the boot sector of my Ubuntu partition, I don't want to change GRUB's location. I believe GRUB is installed in the boot sector of the ext3 partition. I can see a folder hda6/boot/grub and inside is a file menu.lst.

My understanding of the boot sequence is this (and might be wrong):
BIOS checks which medium (floppy, HDD, CDROM, USB, network) is set up to be primary boot device. In case of HDD, it loads the first sector (MBR = IPL + 4x16 bytes partition table + 2 bytes signature) of the first HDD into RAM at location 0000:7C00h. It then passes control to IPL.

IPL (initial program loader = first 446 bytes of MBR) checks for errors, relocates itself, loads one sector from disk (boot sector of active primary partition) into RAM at location 0000:7C00h and passes control to it.

Boot sector (or boot record) checks for errors, loads kernel file (IO.SYS for DOS, NTLDR for XP, ...) and passes control to it.

Now this the point where I think that different OS implement different strategies to continue. But I think that NTLDR might be able to boot Ubuntu, If I only manage to save the boot record of the EXT3 partition to a file on C: (eg C:\SECTOR\ubuntu.bin) and add a line to boot.ini saying "C:\SECTOR\ubuntu.bin = "Ubuntu 7.10"

PTedit.png


I have just remembered that a disk editor is the tool to do that (cylinder 521, head 1, sector 1 in my case, screenshot inside spoiler). More by chance than design that sector is accessible by old DOS tools who can only read the first 1024 cylinders. But I am not sure weather that will be the best/correct way to go.

Reading this makes me think to give up for now on NTLDR, but insert an entry in C:\BOOT\GRUB\menu.lst which is used by GRUB4DOS. GRUB4DOS shows a menu initially and offers editing and a command line. The entry which I have added goes like this (copied from mounted ext3 disk, /boot/grub/menu.list):

title Ubuntu 7.10
root (hd0,5)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=06031e16-7deb-44ad-b2b1-74736c0c3e5f ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.22-14-generic
quiet

I cannot thank you enough for your replies to my posts, as they are always giving me directions. My biggest problem at the moment is that I can't even ask questions, because I don't know what to ask. Especially when answering "what do you mean?" I realize how profund my ignorance is on Linux related topics. Your questions keep directing my lines of thought and when I finally send my next post (I often need more than an hour just to write a post), I feel as if I have taken the next step on my journey to Linux. :)

Armando for president!


Greetings
Wolf

40
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 27, 2007, 09:10 PM »
Hi Armando, :)

I'm back in WinXP now. I have mounted my new Ubuntu and can read the filesystem. It is mounted as hda6, but I'm sure there was something with sdxxx to be seen inside Ubuntu, I will post exact info, as soon as I can.

Clipboard06.png

Where do you think can I get the boot sector of that partition. The first 512 byte of the file vmlinuz look OK to me. I just put it in my boot.ini and test it. See you later, I hope ...

Wolf

41
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 27, 2007, 07:53 PM »
Right now the installation of Ubuntu 7.10 to hard disk is running in the background. Real easy if you read the messages on the screen, and have a clear idea what you want. I have opted out where it says "Install Boot Loader to sda0" or something. I will try to add an entry to GRUB4DOS, or to boot.ini. Have you got any suggestions?

Installation complete, my experiments continue ...

Wolf

42
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 27, 2007, 07:08 PM »
I am very happy to announce that this post is send from Ubuntu OS that I have started from a live CD, about 5 minutes after I burned it to CD. Thanks to Armando, who has pointed out that the desktop i386 distribution is actually a live CD. I have a monitor with 1680x1050 resolution and every single pixel is supported. And I heard some melody coming from my speakers during the boot process. [Edit: obviously my LAN works as well]

Armando, thank you for your tip. When I said "Non-X" Ubuntu I meant: Ubuntu as opposed to Xubuntu, following your advice. Sorry for that, I know that X is a very often used term in the Linux world. Just a beginner talking here.


Greetings
Wolf

43
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 27, 2007, 04:58 PM »
Yes, I think my CPU is 32-bit, When I am finished with it it may well be 128 bits though  :D
I stick with the non-X ubuntu, but I am not sure about me being able to cope with a text-based installer. I have got vast experience with VMware Browser Appliance (I started it about 5 times  :) ), which is based on ubuntu. So if i am not posting anything from now til Christmas, I will post again after Christmas from inside new hardware secondary to my 32 to 128 bit conversion. Just kidding.

44
Hi Brandon,

sounds like a great idea. Would you be so kind and maybe post a screenshot of that 1024x768 plus minus 5 pixels user interface. I am dying of curiosity!


Greetings
Wolf


45
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 27, 2007, 12:53 PM »
Thanks for the hint, Armando!
I have downloaded the ISO images already and found that the CDs do not run on my virtual machine. :(
So I just burn them for real and see how it goes. BTW is the file ubuntu-7.10-desktop-i386.iso the correct version to be used as a live CD?

46
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 27, 2007, 12:00 PM »
Thank you very much for that link. It says somewhere near the top of the page:

The state of grub's documentation is such that you can't figure it out unless you already know grub.
That catch 22 is the very purpose of this document. This document will to give you enough grub expertise ...

This document is for Lunix users only. I think that gave me the last bit of encouragement, that was needed to go ahead and install (x)ubuntu on my hard drive. Version 7.10 has been released just 9 days ago.



Greetings
Wolf

Edit: Also I learned from your link, that I should have been expecting a grub command line interface (prompt) rather than a menu.
Langsam ernährt sich das Eichhörnchen.

47
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 27, 2007, 03:01 AM »
Hi Armando,

Long version
I have the general goal to write my own boot manager, or to be able to use an existing boot manager which can:
1.) overwrite a particular entry in MBR's partition table with a new entry, that is read from a list that I supply. I have done that using debug.exe successfully. Ranish PM can do that, but is limited to 32 entries.
2.) enumerate all entries in an extended partition table and change the partition type eg from FAT32 to hidden FAT or to unformatted, or even delete the selected partition. At the moment, gdisk.exe can do that in batch mode.

With GRUB, my initial goal is to find out what it can do and to experiment with it. I would like to have a floppy disk that I could use on an old laptop or on a virtual machine. So far my efforts were failures. I have done something like:

command /c copy /b stage1 + stage2 grub.flp

then write grub.flp to floppy using rawwrite. Result: BIOS POST messages on screen as normal, then screen goes black, then error message displayed at the top of screen: "Error!". I patched my grub.flp like this:

command /c copy /b grub.flp + bytes.f6 grub.ima

where bytes.f6 is a file that consits entirely of hex value F6. It's size was so that the resulting grub.ima was 1,747,560 bytes in size. Then again rawwrite grub.ima to floppy. Result: BIOS POST messages on screen as normal, then screen goes black, then error message displayed at the top of screen: "Error!"

I was expecting to get a GRUB menu with the ability to manually add/edit new entries. I have found GRUB4DOS and am able to see a menu with edit options. Unfortunately GRUB4DOS lacks documentation, but if I understand the article Experience of Using Grub For DOS correctly, knowing how to use GRUB will help.

In short: I want a floppy with GRUB installed. :)

Now please don't misunderstand the above. I don't ask anybody to do it for me. I will do all the necessary reading myself, not only because it is a topic that interests me since many years. I suspect that my floppy is not all that bad, maybe it lacks just something like menu.lst somewhere. But it is beyond my capabilities to fix it. Reading is going slowly, confusing at times. A little hint how to create the floppy correctly would be much appreciated.


Greetings
Wolf

48
Living Room / Re: Windows Install Date Thingie: I made it!
« on: October 26, 2007, 01:05 PM »
Install.png

No, not really ...

Clipboard01.png

49
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 26, 2007, 10:31 AM »
Hi Tom,

have you got any experience using GNU GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader) or GRUB4DOS? Or anybody else?

GRUB: I have not even been able to get this stage1 and stage2 thing into such a shape to create a boot floppy or an image of that.

GRUB4DOS is at the moment an entry in my boot.ini which is able to go back to ntldr menu, when selected. There is a lot to read before I get the hang of it. But it looks promising.

50
Living Room / Re: Multibooting and Partitioning Experiments
« on: October 26, 2007, 09:58 AM »
Hi Tom

only today I found, that you have started a thread on multibooting already!
Looks like there is a lot left to learn for me about how to use search properly!

[OT] And thanks for your hello on introductory thread. I answer here for the sake of getting the link above in the right place.  :D


Greetings
Wolf

Pages: prev1 [2] 3next