[syslinux] Question about .bs and .bss style bootsectors.

[Sergey Vlasov]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:34:36PM +0200, Michal Soltys wrote:
> With syslinux used as main bootmanager - bootsectors from xp64, xp32 and 
> [pre-syslinux] msdos 7.1 (98se) work perfectly fine when chainloaded 
> natively as .bs (and dos also as .bss).

They should work if you obtain the .bs files by installing the
corresponding systems using their tools, and then copying the working
bootsector from the same partition; in this case the copied bootsector
already has the proper FAT superblock data inside.

> By the way - there's another "trick" to make dos (at least microsoft
> versions) to boot from another harddisk - if you set actual physical
> drive number in its bootsector and as active flag on the respective disk
> (e.g. 81h instead of 80h). This way there's no need for drive swapping code.

Unfortunately, at least current Linux kernels reject such partition
tables: if the active flag for any partition is neither 0 nor 0x80,
the partition table is considered broken and ignored completely.
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