From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S934098Ab0CNVg0 (ORCPT ); Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:36:26 -0400 Received: from drutsystem.com ([80.72.38.138]:2350 "EHLO drutsystem.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S933710Ab0CNVgU (ORCPT ); Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:36:20 -0400 X-Greylist: delayed 1634 seconds by postgrey-1.27 at vger.kernel.org; Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:36:20 EDT Message-ID: <4B9D506D.3000609@ziu.info> Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:09:01 +0100 From: Michal Soltys User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (Windows/20090812) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Tejun Heo Cc: Mikael Abrahamsson , "linux-ide@vger.kernel.org" , lkml , Daniel Taylor , Jeff Garzik , Mark Lord , tytso@mit.edu, "H. Peter Anvin" , hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp, Andrew Morton , Alan Cox , irtiger@gmail.com, Matthew Wilcox , aschnell@suse.de, knikanth@suse.de, jdelvare@suse.de Subject: Re: ATA 4 KiB sector issues. References: <4B947393.2050002@kernel.org> <4B961D8F.3010500@ziu.info> <4B96E397.1040005@kernel.org> In-Reply-To: <4B96E397.1040005@kernel.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-AV-Checked: ClamAV on drutsystem.com Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Tejun Heo wrote: > > I was thinking about testing XP booting this weekend but really want > to avoid it, so thanks a lot for the info. I'll update the doc > accordingly but can you please enlighten me on how it works and what's > broken in detail? So, XP should be fine with any alignment? > > Thanks. > Sorry for late reply. s/sp2/sp3 - although it shouldn't make a difference from sp2 onwards. Anyway - the tests I did were because of weird laptop, where I shrinked whole win7 stuff and having no primary partitions left to use, I tested my usual windows xp installation I deploy with ntfsclone. Originally that XP were installed from installation disk merged with sp3 (or how it's usually called in windows world - slipstreamed). Of course, windows xp itself will not present any options to install itself into logical partition in the usual way - but during later deployment it's not a problem to put it where one's want. It's possible that this wouldn't work, if windows were installed first from pre-sp2 media, and then service pack was installed (in such case, ntldr in C:\ is not updated afaik). It's also possible, that "brute-force" copied pre-sp2 or win2k to a partition made with either - a) xp sp2+'s disk manager or b) mkfs.ntfs and with updated most recent ntldr - would boot as well (the partition requirement is due to potential differences between the code in bootsector, or more precisely - $Boot - first 8KiB of ntfs partition). Obvious requirements besides the above (ntldr, perhaps $Boot as well) are: - mentioned "hidden sectors" (must be manually adjusted, recent syslinux's chain.c32 has option to do it automatically) - adjusted boot.ini (to point to new partition, eventually other windowish stuff as necessary) As you can see, there're many "if"s and combinations here that I didn't test. On a related note - ironically, while I had 0 problems making it work through syslinux (both regular chaining and through direct ntldr loading) - I couldn't make win7's bootmgr (bcd, bcdedit ....) do it properly. Oh well.