Re: How stable is NTFS write?

From: Paul Flinders (paul@dawa.demon.co.uk)
Date: Tue May 30 2000 - 10:54:47 EST


"Michael D. Crawford" <crawford@goingware.com> writes:

>
> Further, rather than using lilo to boot my machine, I use the NT boot
> manager. This is easily done by using lilo to install the boot block
> into the superblock of the root partition, then I do this to get my
> bootsector:
>
> dd if=/dev/hda3 of=bootsect.lin bs=512 count=1
>
> then I copy bootsect.lin to my fat filesystem, _then_boot_into_nt_ then
> copy it to my NTFS partition, where the NT boot menu is already set up
> to expect that for a boot sector for linux, then reboot again.

I'm in a similar situation and it *is* a pain to have to copy the boot
sector across on a floppy - fortunately you can use the NT loader
without having to update the NT copy of the boot sector each time you
rebuild a kernel.

The trick to doing this is to use lilo in two stages, NT has a dummy
copy that simply pulls in the real one. The dummy never needs to
change.

Start with this lilo config file, with the partitions edited for
your set-up. Save it in, say, /etc/lilo-nt.conf

boot=/boot/chain.bs
map=/boot/chain-map
install=/boot/boot.b
timeout=10
default=Linux

# the partition here is where the real lilo boot sector lives
# it should be the same as the partition specified in the boot=
# line of your "real" lilo.conf
other=/dev/hda1
        label=Linux
        table=/dev/hda

If /boot resides above or could cross cylinder 1024 you need the
latest lilo. Initialise the dummy boot sector (/boot/chain.bs) to a
512 byte block of nulls, then run lilo [-L] -C /etc/lilo-nt.conf

Now copy /boot/chain.bs to where the NT loader expects it. Now even if
you re-run lilo you don't need to update the NT side. I do this both
at home and at work and it works fine, the only "price" is that if you
look carefully you can see that lilo actually loads twice.

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