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Re: Boot bootmanager - and HPFS GRUB

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Ilya Zakharevich wrote:
> 1) Does anybody know how to boot bootmanager?  (I mean, without
>     installing it to a real primary partition?)
>
>     My conjecture is that it may work from a virtual hard drive.  If
>     so, then I would install bootmanager to a virtual hard drive (e.g.,
>     from DOS), then load the drive image using MEMDISK (or Grub4dos),
>     and "boot from a partition on this harddrive".
>
>     Hmm, I see problems: one is that this boot would use the EXISTING
>     information from the "real drives"; but how would one WRITE this
>     information?  I suppose FDISK would not allow me to write the boot
>     options if it cannot see BootManager installed...
>
>     The second problem is that creation of this virtual drive MIGHT mix
>     up drive-letter assignment.  But it should not if BootManager is
>     the only primary partition on the virtual drive...
>

Did not tried that, but it is probably, possible. The OS/2 bootmanager 
loads from a primary partition, but its binary image takes only 14 Kb, 
the extra space is empty. If I correctly understood, the newer versions 
(from Aurora and newer OS/2 versions) take the drives list from LVM DLA 
tables, so they aren't stored on the bootmanager partition. So, you can 
extract the BM from its partition (it has its own boot sector, which is 
like FAT one actually). For example, it can be taken from DFSee 
distribution as a dfsibmgr.img file. I'm pretty sure that you can load 
it at 0x7c00 physical address, and jump to its beginning.

> 2) Does anybody has working HPFS-Stage1.5 for GRUB (one which would
>     allow GRUB to load from HPFS partition)...

I kinda, have :) I've written a HPFS backend for FreeLDR, it could be 
ported to GRUB with minimal changes (as FreeLDR is GRUB based, 
actually). It has some problems, but loads files from HPFS pretty well. 
The sources are at Sourceforge osFree repository, if you're interested.

You can take the binaries from my ftp 
(ftp://valerius.osfree.tk/incoming/freeldr/), if you want.

BTW, FreeLDR can be installed on the same HPFS or JFS partition, which 
is bootable for OS/2, it can be loaded like os2ldr from that partition. 
(The best way is to boot it as another os2ldr version from os2ldr.ini menu).

>
> Thanks,
> Ilya

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Re: Boot bootmanager - and HPFS GRUB "Valery V. Sedletski" <_valerius@mail.ru> - 2012-08-10 03:16 +0400
  Re: Boot bootmanager - and HPFS GRUB "Valery V. Sedletski" <_valerius@mail.ru> - 2012-08-10 03:55 +0400

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