From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Fri, 17 Sep 1999 10:32:30 +1000 Message-Id: <199909170032.KAA13065@tango.anu.edu.au> From: Paul Mackerras To: linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org In-reply-to: <199909160742.JAA00362@piglet.cpu.lu> (message from Michel Lanners on Thu, 16 Sep 1999 09:42:09 +0200 (CEST)) Subject: Re: New booter (about quik) Reply-to: Paul.Mackerras@cs.anu.edu.au References: <199909160742.JAA00362@piglet.cpu.lu> Sender: owner-linuxppc-dev@lists.linuxppc.org List-Id: Michel Lanners wrote: > No, quik is a two-part boot process. quik installs a first-stage boot > loader in the boot block of a disk partition. I admit I am not sure if > this partition needs to be a HFS partition, or if it can be an ext2 > partition... (Paul?) No, it needs to be an ext2 partition. AFAIK the first 1k of an HFS partition isn't free. The way that the older OF boots from a hard disk partition is that it uses a couple of fields in the partition table entry which give the location of the bootstrap in terms of the start and length of a contiguous set of blocks in the partition. OF just loads those blocks into memory and jumps to them. The quik installer program sets those fields to point to the first 2 blocks of the partition. So in principle it would be possible to put the quik first-stage bootstrap on an HFS partition. You would just have it as a contiguous HFS file somewhere and set the partition table entry to point to it. Paul. ** Sent via the linuxppc-dev mail list. See http://lists.linuxppc.org/