re: bootable cylinder limit? >The point is that if you use Windows you must use its boot menu, and it's > easier to configure it to boot multiple OS than grub or lilo. EasyBSD > handles all the boot blocks for you.
One problem is that everything is old (including me). The computers are from 2003 and 2008, they get hard drives replaced every few years before they wear out. Windows is XP (Pro, sp 3) because I don't spend money on Microsoft products. The computers came with COA stickers for XP, that's what I use. EasyBCD does nothing, it won't even install under XP. I've been multibooting for 15 years, that in itself isn't the problem, I've done it many times. I probably won't try FreeBSD and OpenBSD together again. Mostly I use one tool to make my partitions and a second one to check up on it, looking for things like overlapped partitions and partitions not ending on cylinder boundaries. As disks get bigger the tools have to be replaced. My favorite until this drive was gdisk by Symantek, part of the Ghost package. This time I used Gparted http://gparted.org/ and it looks OK so far, I used the live Linux CD version. Make the partitions right and even Windows will live with them, but I always install it first because it has a history of obliterating other operating systems on the same drive. And let it run the show, use its boot menu, start other operating systems from boot.ini. The problem is that every computer's BIOS can only allocate X number of bits for storing things like a cylinder number or (worse) an LBA. Historically there have always been limits, sometimes you can update the motherboard's BIOS and that helps a little. There was one at 540 MB. But these limits are rarely published because partly they depend on the BIOS and partly the drive geometry. Drive geometry isn't absolute, you don't have to stick with hardware reality. Too many heads? Cut it in half and double the cylinders instead. That's not always wise but it's been done. The manufacturers put the limit so high it won't be a problem, but then drives get bigger. My first hard drive was 20 megabytes, now I have some 6(?) orders of magnitude bigger, Write something in assembly using only BIOS interrupts (no operating system) that gets hooked by the BIOS when booting to start it, it tries to access higher and higher LBAs until it fails, meanwhile logging. I taught myself x86 assembly language about 1994, haven't used it since, but it sounds possible. I used the A86, Masm, Tasm assemblers, not nasm, but to me the thrill of assembly is that things happen instantly when the program's running. My new fast machine was a 40 MHz 386 SX motherboard with a brand new 200 megabyte hard drive. I pounded a lot of nails, did a lot of grunt work, to earn it. On 11/25/15, Peter Kay <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes, it is possible for grub to boot Windows. LILO too, it can even boot > Xen if you use mbootpack (otherwise it doesn't support initrd). > > The point is that if you use Windows you must use its boot menu, and it's > easier to configure it to boot multiple OS than grub or lilo. EasyBSD > handles all the boot blocks for you. > -- > Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. -- Credit is the root of all evil. - AB1JX
