[Tfug] Partition Second Drive

[Bexley Hall]

--- DON KIERZEK <donkzk at msn.com> wrote:

> My googling tells me the MBR can only directly boot
> a primary active partition but can load LILO or GRUB
> which then boots OS's in other locations.

The MBR is just a piece of code on the (PC) disk.
The BIOS is the thing that gives significance to the
MBR as the BIOS loads this into memory and executes
it at power up.  That "MBR" could, in turn, load
*another* chunk of code off the disk -- or
anything else it wants to do.  MS's "standard"
MBR code has space for 4 partitions and *conventions*
by which it marks one of those "active" (bootable),
etc.  You could rewrite and replace this record
with your own code to do whatever you want -- if
you want to adopt your own scheme, etc.  Some
OS's have *three* level bootstraps... "boot sector"
has a piece of code that loads *another* SMARTER
(and larger) piece of code which, in turn, loads
a file from a real file system (hence the SMARTER
code has to know how to interpret that file system)

Replacing the boot loader with "something smarter"
changes all of the rules about how many partitions
you can have, etc.  And, some OS's further cut
those partitions into "slices" (onto which,
filesystems can be built).

[snip]

> about a guy who has over 100 os's installed on one
> computer with a fairly detailed description about 
> how he did it.  Guess he has a lot of free time, 
> interesting though.

<grin>  Hard to imagine 100 OS's with something
to *offer*!  :>

I run Inferno on Windows98 *inside* a CDE window
on a SPARC (i.e. non x86) machine -- so, three
*layers* of OS!  (I wonder if I could get Squeak
to run under Inferno??  :>)

--don

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