unable to use BOOT EASY to boot linux

[Gary W. Swearingen]

Johnson David <DavidJohnson at Siemens.com> writes:

> On Wednesday 07 April 2004 02:21 pm, Tadimeti Keshav wrote:
>> hi all.
>> I added a 2 GB linux disk as a slave and installed
>> Mandrake Linux with LILO on the root partition of
>> linux.
>
> So far this is correct. LILO needs to be on the *root* partition.

No, it doesn't.  It only needs to be on some boot record: the MBR or
the BR of one of the 4 primary partitions.  It was once common to put
it on a small /boot partition in the first 1024 cylinders (no longer
necessary), with the Linux root partition above 1024.

> The standard boot loader is NOT a boot loader. All it will do is boot 
> the partition that is marked bootable. You want to choose BootMgr for 
> each harddrive, if you want to use the FreeBSD boot manager. Please see 
> the section in the Handbook" 2.5.3 Install a Boot Manager".

The IBM/MSFT(?)-standard boot loader *is* a boot loader; just slightly
less sophisticated than "Boot Easy", and not interactive.  Both load
more further bootstrap code to boot one or more OSes (or some program
for that matter).  I guess it's debatable, depending on definitions,
whether the standard boot loader is a boot manager.

> It's amazing that they were able to fit a general purpose boot manager 
> into only 512 bytes! Chapter 7 of the Handbook "The FreeBSD Booting 
> Process" describes this in excruciating detail.

It fits in 447 (=512-1-16*4) bytes, IIRC.  Beware that the Handbook's
"stage one" is (at least) the third stage in the bootstrap process,
counting the BIOS boot code and the MBR boot code.