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Boot Manager with EFI partition table support and LVM metadata support

Cross-posted to 4 groups.

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For those of you who have been playing with CHKVOL, FORMAT, and VMDISK:

You've had all of the things bar one for running my Boot Manager.  
Unless you exercised your curiosity, you maybe didn't realize that you 
had a SYS command.  That, and two more files, are enough to get you my 
Boot Manager.  The two additional files are now available at the same 
WWW page that you downloaded CHKVOL et al. from.  Here's the five-step 
procedure to getting a Boot Manager volume on a removable bootable FAT 
medium.  Notice that Boot Manager doesn't care what the medium is.  It 
must be directly bootable by the machine firmware (i.e. be a "whole 
disc" removable disc, or a primary partition on a non-removable disc). 
But other than that it could be a floppy disc or a volume on a removable 
memory stick for all that Boot Manager cares.

Notes:  For now, the volume must be formatted using the FAT filesystem.  
This is a temporary limitation.  As far as firmware is concerned, I've 
tested this on machines with Phoenix-Award and AMIBIOS firmwares and it 
works as designed.  Dave Yeo is currently having trouble with another 
machine.  If you experience an FE01 error, which is a firmware "invalid 
parameters" error, you're in the same boat as M. Yeo.  We're currently 
investigating what is going on with M. Yeo's firmware.  You'll find that 
the Boot Manager has spat out a load of stuff at you.  Let me know the 
details via electronic mail.

Another thing that M. Yeo has is discs partitioned with IBM's LVM.  Boot 
Manager should pull out the partition names from the LVM metadata and 
display them.  But as noted in a previous message I've added in the IBM 
LVM partition table support blind, and, in the absence of documentation 
as to the exact algorithm for locating the IBM LVM metadata this might 
require some tweaking to cover all possibilities, which of course I 
cannot do here without something to test against.

STEP ONE: HIGH-LEVEL FORMAT THE VOLUME AS FAT.

You can format it with my FORMAT.  If it's already high-level formatted, 
that's alright.  But formatting it with my FORMAT will get you a FAT 
volume with an extended volume boot record, which is in general the more 
robust boot record in the face of things like file fragmentation and so 
forth.  Note that the disc must already be low-level formatted before 
you run FORMAT.

     format /v "TAU Boot Manager volume" b:

STEP TWO: PUT THE MINI-FSD AND MICRO-FSD ON IT.

You do this with my SYS.

     sys b:

STEP THREE: MAKE THE REQUIRED DIRECTORIES.

The Boot Manager ships as if it is in a \TAU\BootMgr\ directory.  In 
order to work it must actually be in a \TAU\Boot\ directory.

     mkdir b:\tau

     mkdir b:\tau\boot

STEP FOUR: COPY THE BOOT MANAGER FILES ON.

Presuming that you've unpacked the Boot Manager into the \TAU\BootMgr\ 
directory on drive Q:, simply copy the files across.

     copy q:\tau\bootmgr\* b:\tau\boot\*

STEP FIVE: CONFIGURATION.

Simply edit the configuration file, b:\tau\boot\bootmgr.cfg, according 
to taste. You might even not want to change anything at all.

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Boot Manager with EFI partition table support and LVM metadata support Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-05-06 12:04 +0100
  Re: Boot Manager with EFI partition table support and LVM metadata support Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard-newsgroups@NTLWorld.COM> - 2011-05-12 08:06 +0100

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