[syslinux] syslinux: Please provide -m and -a options on Linux

Michal Soltys soltys at ziu.info
Wed Sep 8 17:06:47 PDT 2010


On 10-09-04 22:32, Ferenc Wagner wrote:
>
> The interesting part is finding out where to copy mbr.bin and which
> partition to set active, just think about the Linux RAID support.  And
> it will be complicated further by LVM for example.  However, some pretty
> general code is already available for this, albeit not integrated into
> Syslinux.  Furthermore, as the original reporter added, the simplest
> case is also the most common one: installing Syslinux onto a USB stick.

For that particular case, the installation is as easy as it gets:

dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/<mbr of one's choide> of=/dev/<stick>

All mbr variations (including gpt) provided by syslinux are 439 or 440 
bytes long - so there's no risk of doing any harm to the exisitng 
partition layout. Then just set the flag (and/or byte at offset 439 for 
altmbr variations).

Raid/lvm cases aren't really that different, if the user approaches them 
with reason (no idea though how forceful debian is with making user do 
it the "debian way" - standard mdadm and lvm tools are pretty well 
documented and flexible though).




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