Re: Boot.ini question

Rod Speed wrote:


Thats just the way its currently done. In the past it could only
boot from the first physical drive, or the floppy, and later the
cdrom drive was added to the list of possibilitys.


It does not know about partitions, slices or anything
finely grained (and much less extended or logical
partitions, or filesystems, obviously).


There's no technical reason why the bios cant understand
partitions and allow the user to select a partition to boot.

And the big advantage of giving the bios that capability is
that you can boot any partition on any drive if a drive dies etc.




Architecturally, what you propose would be a problem. For a BIOS to be able to boot from any partition would require the BIOS to understand file systems. Not just any file system, but every file system that one may use, now and in the future, for the feature to work universally.

The BIOS should provide services to the OS and start the boot process. Knowing a files system belongs in the loader and OS.
.

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