[syslinux] Booting

[H. Peter Anvin]

Jacob Alifrangis wrote:
> I believe that doing this on a GPT formatted disk could totally zap the partitions, ESPECIALLY in hybrid mode. 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com] On Behalf Of H. Peter Anvin
> Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 7:31 AM
> To: For discussion of SYSLINUX and tftp-hpa
> Subject: Re: [syslinux] Booting
> 
> Murali (முரளி கணபதி) wrote:
>>> Actually, 3.60 introduced persistent storage for extlinux, which could
>>> be used for this purpose.  It is currently missing installer support for
>>> syslinux, but the core module support is there.
>> For ISOLinux and PXELinux, one might be able to get away with using
>> the *later sectors* in Track 0 (after leaving space for the MBR) on
>> the first hard disk. Of course, this assumes that the "first hard
>> disk" remains the same across boots and that various disk formatting
>> utilities dont touch that area.
>>
>> My "autoboot.c32" does that and I found that the assumptions seemed to be true!
>>
>>> But yes, you need to set the bios boot order to boot from whatever
>>> medium actually has syslinux on it.
>>>
> 
> It's by and large true for MS-DOS partition tables (although something 
> else can use it...)  However, for non-MS-DOS partition tables it could 
> be worse.
> 

Yes.  I'm considering having an option to do this, but it would have to 
be explicitly configured.

	-hpa