[haiku-development] Boot menu
- From: R Nikolaev <rhaiku@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 12:47:41 -0700 (PDT)
Hi
I do not know if Haiku needs boot menu (select which partition to boot from) or
it already has it. If it already has it, just ignore this message.
I do not know if it is relevant to the moment but a couple of years ago I have
written a boot menu on Assembler that is similar to the one used in BeOS. It
should be placed on the first 2KB of the MBR (which is OK since usually 64Kb is
free; even if you use LDM, you still have 2KB there).
There is no GUI utility that would install boot menu automatically. The problem
is that I do not how to determine the mapping of HDDs between BIOS and kernel.
Right now, you just need to specify BIOS drive number (e.g. 80) manually.
Everything is self-explanatory. Just see the comments.
See the following posts for the files: osmenu.asm, mbrstub.asm, makefile. I
compiled them using WASM from OpenWatcom (I think it is possible to compile it
using FASM/NASM with minimum amount of changes).
Also, make sure that you preserve MBR table since those files just contain
zeros in that place.
I do not have time right now to support it but it would be nice if somebody
wants to, put it on SVN. May be either I or somebody else later would write a
GUI tool for this.
ALSO I am not sure that this version does not have any bugs. I am little bit
confused since I have several versions of it and it hard to tell which one was
working. I can test it when I have time.
Thanks,
Ruslan Nikolaev.
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