Comment 39 for bug 496435
Revision history for this message
| Roland Hughes (original-seasoned-geek) wrote | #39 |
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0e1f616
(Get the code!)
The thing which is needed is agreement with the BIOS because ONLY THAT CAN PROVIDE CONSISTENCY WITH THE OTHER OPERATING SYSTEMS. They ALL respect the BIOS, even the boot order changes done in PROM or at boot time via a hot key.
Claiming BIOS ordering is irrelevant is simply demonstrating a complete lack of knowledge regarding the booting of every other PC based OS. If you could actually learn about BIOS ordering you wouldn't need further conversation on this issue because you would actually FIX the problem.
By ignoring the BIOS drive ordering, if you magically happen to cobble together something which gets the boot drive and partition correct (so far, not a big worry), you reek havoc on the other operating systems. Most people who run multiple operating systems keep spare FAT-16 and/or FAT-32 partitions around lying around for data transfer. These partitions typically appear before their removable devices and appear in a BIOS predictable order. When you try to magic-magic behind the scenes, this changes the drive mapping order and their boot scripts, which worked perfect prior to the installation of Ubuntu-grub, no longer work.
It is obviously not impossible to honor the BIOS mapping at boot time since it appears the boys and girls working on OpenSuSE 11.4 managed to do it. FreeDOS boots and works like it should. The FAT-32 transfer partitions all are mapped correctly, and yes, my BIOS selects the drive it boots from.