[Tfug] Partition Second Drive

[Stephen Hooper]

On 10/26/06, Bexley Hall <bexley401 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- 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??  :>)
>

I never understood why Inferno was considered an Operating System...
isn't it pretty much just a VM?  Does it run natively on anything?

To excuse what are probably stupid questions... I only toyed with it
when I was interested in Plan 9, installed it, and was kind of
disappointed I didn't have to wave magical wands to get it running.