Re: Boot.ini question

"Gerhard Fiedler" wrote:
Timothy Daniels wrote:

"Gerhard Fiedler" wrote:
How would you then calculate the rdisk number out of the
"hard drive boot order" for disks that can't be booted?

"rdisk" is a parameter with meaning only to ntldr in the selection
of hard drives for booting.

Correct in that rdisk in boot.ini has meaning only to ntldr. Wrong
in the use of "booting": it's meaning is the selection of a hard
drive for starting Windows.


Why would someone want the "rdisk" value for hard drives that can't be
booted, i.e. drives that ntldr can't boot?

You don't understand the difference between "booting" and "starting
Windows".

"Booting" is when the BIOS loads ntldr into memory and starts it.

"Starting Windows" is after ntldr reads boot.ini, optionally displays the
selection menu and starts Windows from the controller, drive, partition and
directory indicated by the chosen entry. This controller, drive and
partition does not have to be bootable by the BIOS.

One of the purposes is to allow selection of an extended partition or a
drive that the BIOS can't boot to start Windows.


You seem to confuse "disk" and "drive". I use the term "hard drive"
to refer to the physical device, "Local Disk" to refer to a Primary
partition, and "logical drive" to refer to a sections within an Extended
partition. In the selection of a drive for booting, rdisk() does select
the physical hard drive. It is partition() that selects which Primary
partition (or Logical Drive within an Extended partition) to load the
OS from. Ntldr uses partition() to find the Primary partition (or
logical drive within an Extended partition) to access the Windows
folder (which defaults to "WINDOWS" during OS installation").
It's not generally known that ntldr can load Windows from within an
Extended partition, but it can, and I've checked in on my own Dell
PC. The value of "m" in partition(m) in the case of a logical drive
seems to progress through the Primary partitions on the hard drive,
then progress through the logical drives in the Extended partitions,
so the value of "m" to use for logical drives may take a bit of
experimentation.

As for the difference between "boot" and "load" and "start",
that is a very gray area in the IT vocabulary. Ntldr is frequently
called a "boot loader" and "boot manager", and it *is* loaded
by the boot sector which was loaded by the MBR which was
loaded by the BIOS, but whether ntldr is a "booter" or a "loader"
would depend on whether there is a load process within Windows
which takes over to load Windows, and few people seem to
know that, and fewer seem to care. But all that is important in
*this* discussion is that "rdisk()" designates the physical hard
drive, and "partition()" designates the Local Disk (or logical drive
in the case of an Extended partition) on that physical hard drive
where the Windows folder may be found.

*TimDaniels*
.

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