Re: Booting win98 from an extended partition

[Stefan Ondrejicka]

On Sat, 6 Jan 2001, OKUJI Yoshinori wrote:

Hi,

> > I'm trying to use GRUB 0.5.96.1 to boot Win98SE from an extended partition 
> > (drive G: in win98, /dev/sda7 in linux), but the boot loader just gives the 
> > standard "invalid system" message. Booting the same partition works fine 
> > with the OS/2 boot manager.
> 
>   I guess that OS/2 boot manager uses some magic that I don't know
> yet. Do you know if there is any free boot loader which can boot Win*
> from an extended partition? If there is, we will be able to steal code
> (or at least an idea) from it. (Note that I use the term "free" in GNU
> sense here, that is, source code is freely available.)


:-) I know one - grub. If you remember, sometimes in summer I have posted
here patch for booting any operating system from logical disk in extended
partition with the magic of mapping logical partition to one entry of
primary partition. You have considered this trick like dirty hack which
break you rules for grub design. Something similar can be achived with the
partnew command which is included now in latest grub, but you must know
exact position of your logical disk, which you must dig somehow from the
disk. I wrote one small linux utility for this. If you want, I can upload
it tomorow on the web. 
In case of booting windows you must also hide the logical partition which
you will map to primary, because you will have the disk visible twice.
Enough is to change the id of the partition.

I am not sure wheter also OS/2 boot manager uses this way to boot
operating systems from logical disks, maybe there is other posibility.

Best regards,
Stevo.

-- 
Stefan Ondrejicka <address@hidden>
Beethovenova 11, 917 08 Trnava, Slovakia
http://www.idata.sk/~ondrej/