Re: Guidance on conflicts between GNU GRUB and proprietary software

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

On 09/28/2010 11:46 PM, Grégoire Sutre wrote:
> Regarding the question of whether such an MSDOS partition type exists,
> I did not look very hard, but 45h comes to mind.  This type is used by
> the Boot-US boot manager.  It is reported as such by NetBSD fdisk.  It
> is not listed in the known types of Linux fdisk.  Are you aware of
> other uses for this partition type?
Eumel according to
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/partitions/partition_types-1.html.
>
> If we really want to embed in an MSDOS partition, selecting a
> partition type that is already used for similar purposes is IMHO our
> best option. This would be a step in a direction to set a ``standard''
> MSDOS type for boot partitions.  We don't need one partition type per
> boot-loader software anyway.
OS/2 used type 0x0a. If someone wants to install the OS/2 on his
computer (I wouldn't attempt it on anything newer than Pentium 3) then
he probably wants to chainload it (direct loading OS/2 would require
much work and has no point, adapting ntldr would be possible though, but
I wouldn't spend any time on it). So he needs 2 boot managers. Probably
there are other similar cases as well.
Deleting some other bootloader may also appear unfair and lead to data
loss if its partition contained anything useful. I don't mind sharing
the embedding partition on the rule "who gets MBR gets this bonus, all
possible occupants have to implement multiboot to be chainloaded if
necessary" but former users of partition type may disagree.
>
> Grégoire
>
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>


-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko

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