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

[H. Peter Anvin]

Sergey Vlasov wrote:
> 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.

Yes, but I wonder if one can do it without touching the on-disk 
partition table.

	-hpa