Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!usenet.pasdenom.info!goblin2!goblin.stu.neva.ru!cyclone03.ams2.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!npeersf01.ams.highwinds-media.com!newsfe12.ams2.POSTED!00000000!not-for-mail From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.utilities,comp.os.os2.misc,comp.os.os2.beta,comp.os.os2.setup.storage Subject: Boot Manager with EFI partition table support and LVM metadata support Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Lines: 70 NNTP-Posting-Host: 86.20.254.174 X-Complaints-To: http://netreport.virginmedia.com X-Trace: newsfe12.ams2 1304679954 86.20.254.174 (Fri, 06 May 2011 11:05:54 UTC) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 06 May 2011 11:05:54 UTC Organization: virginmedia.com Date: Fri, 06 May 2011 12:04:20 +0100 Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.os.os2.utilities:99 comp.os.os2.misc:419 comp.os.os2.beta:150 comp.os.os2.setup.storage:24 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.