Re: Boot.ini question

In news:1abx96a5nn6wp.1oiakdn3ci33r$.dlg@xxxxxxxxxx,
Gerhard Fiedler va escriure:
ntldr gets read from disk, loaded into memory and then run by the
BIOS. Since you seem to object to the common term "booting" for
this, I'll call this for the rest of the discussion "loading ntldr".
Since ntldr gets loaded by the BIOS, it only can be loaded by the
BIOS from drives the BIOS can boot from (sorry for this confusing
term <g>, but that's the one you were using).

Admitting this lemma...

This would be the drives in the BIOS's "hard drive boot order" list.

.... it does not match with what Tim was saying initially.


ntldr may be able to load Windows from drives the BIOS can't boot
from

What you seem to miss is that Tim's BIOS does not have such a concept.

Sure, one of my BIOS, and an awful large number of other BIOSes out there as
well, do have such drives; yet, there are other BIOSes which allow to boot
easily from any drive recognized by the BIOS (BAID), and furthermore it
seems reasonable to envision this.


(that is, it can't load ntldr from them).

That's two different things. Being able to boot from a harddisk is
ordinarily reserved to the 80h drive; being able to load Ntldr (into memory)
is not so restricted.


Whether ntldr can load Windows from a drive has nothing to do
with whether the BIOS can load ntldr from that drive.

(Of course, due to entertraining confusion, one has to mentally change "to
load" to the more generally used "to boot" above).

This are two different processes -- one is controlled by the BIOS,
the other is controlled by ntldr.

Well, here you mean "to control" to designate the binary code which is
executing initially. I would reserve "to control" to designate the small,
configurable, part of the process; in the first case, we'll find the "boot
order" (whatever that means), and also the actual MBR and secondary boot
code; in the second case, Boot.ini.

What is important here is that both are not completely independant;
particularly, if you change the "boot order" (and hence the placement of the
Boot.ini file, Rod's main point, very true indeed), you could also affect
the interpretation of Boot.ini.
Which, ultimately, was Tim's point.


Antoine

.

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