At 10:57 PM 10/22/2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: On its utility page, there is 'mrfloppy', a raw image of a boot floppy to start the boot loader. Could be handy, could've saved my bacon a week ago. - John P.S. What flavor pie?

At 02:57 PM 10/25/2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Won't that sting? Or is that the point? - John

At 09:33 AM 10/26/2004, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: Avert your eyes, everyone! He's licking himself! - John

Rumor has it that Vintage Computer Festival may have mentioned these words: If you're talking Lemon Meringue fresh outta the oven, I doubt you'd like it (well, not for *long*, anyway! :-O )... Noper, two totally different critters. Boot managers just *replaces* the standard MBR with a customizable MBR so you can boot multiple OSs. It has nothing to do WRT disk geometry or sizes. Linux's Grub is a good example. (LILO can do it too, but it's a little less forgiving of other operating systems.) Even Winders NT/2K/XP boot manager can be twiddled enough to boot Linux, tho it's *not* easy to do. Individual partitions are easily accessible from other OSs as the geometry is still derived from the BIOS/HD itself. OTOH, OnTrack (and others) actually "off-shift" the MBR and add a "pre-loader" which adds a BIOS patch to give the BIOS the ability to recognize larger HDs, or HDs with odd geometries. Then once it loads, the off-shifted MBR is then called and the computer can boot normally. If this BIOS patch is *not* loaded first, then the computer cannot accurately recognize the HD geometry, partition sizes or locations, etc. On the plus side, it's *very* handy every time an idiot PeeCee manufacturer decides to hard-code YADAHDL (that's "Yet Another DumbAss Hard Drive Limitation... ;-) -- First 32Meg, then 528 Meg, then 2Gig, then 8 Gig, then 80Gig, then 127Gig, and I'm sure there's others in between I've forgotten. This code allows a computer with a 528-Meg BIOS limitation (or older computer who's BIOS doesn't have customizable entries) to utilize larger HDs. On the minus side - He who uses this software had better take care on having a good backup plan in place that does not require this software! As the geometry's been "jumbled" to make it work in that environment, if you yank the drive & put it in another machine, the partitions won't be recognized or anything. With OnTrack and some others, you *could* set up a boot floppy with the special code so another machine (if booted from this floppy) could read the partitions & whatnot, but guaranteed, as soon as you need that floppy, you won't be able to find it... ;-) Hope this helps, Roger "Merch" Merchberger So what kinda pie do you want, Sellam? ;^> -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | A new truth in advertising slogan sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | for MicroSoft: "We're not the oxy... zmerch(a)30below.com | ...in oxymoron!"