Re: bad magic on boot attempt

["Joel Rees" <joel@alpsgiken.gr.jp>]

On Thursday, March 14, 2002 6:12 AM, Ben Goren wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 09:05:50PM +0000, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> > Then think of mount_mfs /tmp and have enough swap at the end...
>
> Which  reminds  me:  you  can  probably  share  a  swap  partition
> among all  the Unices. And  maybe with  that awful  ugly obnoxious
> defecating operating system, too?

I was into the archives of microsoft.public.win2000.general or whatever that
is the other day and read someone's post that putting MSW2k's paging file
anywhere but C: would slow it down.

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&selm=uuPC4OzuBHA.2056%40tkmsftngp03

This post (and the thread it was in) caused a storm in my brain:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&selm=5IXG6.2226%24VM5.68824%40ozemail.
com.au

It points out that MSW2k can be set up with a small primary "boot partition"
separate from the C: "drive" that would usually be on the "system
partition". Here's what hit me: if that "primary partition" could be a
"logical partition" instead, we could make the first "physical partition" on
the drive an "extended partition" and set aside the first 500M or so for
"logical partitions" to boot various OSses from. (This assumes that the
equivalent of disklabel for the other systems besides openBSD would be able
to write their partition labels into these "logical partitions".)

Anyway, it is worth noting that recent versions of MSW2k can be loaded from
a partition beyond the 1024 sector boundary. I did this with MSW98 and
MSW2k, so I suspect that the "primary boot partition" will still need to be
within the 1024 sector boundary. Since it only needs to be large enough for
the low-level drivers BIOS loads, it wouldn't really be in the way, other
than consuming one of the four allowed primary partitions.

Building such a scheme and getting the MSW2k install CDs to install into it
may take more understanding of the AUODOS world than it's worth, however. My
experience is that 3 1/2 G is enough for MSW2k's "system partition" (C:), if
you keep all the apps on a separate volume, unless you're running something
in MSW2k that makes really heavy use of swap space.

Okay, now the storm's over, lessee if I can get the mud out of the living
room.

Joel Rees
Alps Giken Kansai Systems Develoment
Suita, Osaka