[Oberon] Re (2): multi-boot examples.

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 8 Oct 2020 at 19:48, <peter at easthope.ca> wrote:
>
> Sorry for the preceding tangle.  With any luck this message will work.

Still a little confusing, I'm afraid! I suggest using plain-text
email. It looks to me like you're using HTML, with new text in black
and quoted text in dark purple. However the 2 seem intermingled.

> Considering the two topics, I'd find the first more interesting.

Which is "the first" here?

> Existing documents about boot managers seem adequate; to me at least.
> A hypothetical potential improvement would be a merger of the two
> pages,
> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Oberon/ETH_Oberon/bootman
> and
> https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Oberon/BootManager .

OK... I've had a quick look at both (I'm currently at work).

The thing that sticks out to me is that they only consider MBR disks
and BIOS firmware. Neither accounts for GPT disks or UEFI firmware,
which is what basically all modern PCs use.

Has anyone tried Bluebottle on a UEFI PC? Can it boot on one? Can it
boot from a GPT partition?

If not, we need to say so.

The chief differences are:
* With GPT disks, there are no primary/extended/logical partitions any
more. The distinction disappears.
* UEFI machines booting from GPT disks need an EFI system  partition,
and a bootloader goes in there. I am sadly fairly sure that Bluebottle
can't do this. I only have older BIOS-based machines, or machines with
UEFI doing BIOS emulation. (And Intel Macs, which probably do not help
us here.) So I can't test this.

> The argument in favor of merger is that a single comprehensive
> document is more useful to a novice than two documents addressing
> roughly the same topic.

Agreed.

I would also argue for removing all the material about DOS, Windows
9x, and Windows NT before Win10. All those OSes are obsolete and
unsupported now. If someone wanted to run Bluebottle on such a PC,
they'd be better off reformatting.

Win10 does not use NTLDR any more. It has a new system derived from BCD.

What do you think?


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