[syslinux] Boot kernel on a different drive/partition

[H. Peter Anvin]

Andrew Goodbody wrote:
> 
> syslinux plus a comboot program in a floppy image integrated into a BIOS
> which will do some custom processing before launching the kernel which
> will be on an hdd. Actually the kernel may have been loaded into RAM
> before it is booted but I still need the comboot program to be able to
> read files from the hdd.
> I know the comboot program can do what it likes and read the hdd
> directly but I want to use the file system support in syslinux rather
> than writing that from scratch and if I do that I could almost drop
> syslinux entirely anyway.
> So I would be happy with a new comboot API function to change what
> syslinux thinks of as its default drive. From that point I could access
> the files on the hdd.
> 

It's not a trivial thing that you ask for, but it's not undoable, 
either.  It pretty much comes down to reinitializing most of syslinux, 
but without reloading the configuration file or anything like that.  As 
such, it requires a fairly careful change, but it's not undoable.

Now, it's important to realize that this will have to close any open 
file descriptors.

	-hpa