Installer should make it possible to install AB to any disk

[Allan]

I often have to boot from different disks, due to
Win requiring to be started from same disk as bios
has booted from.

It would be nice if the installer was able to install
AB to any (selectable) disk

[Ben Rietbroek]

Replying to yoda:

I often have to boot from different disks, due to
Win requiring to be started from same disk as bios
has booted from.

It would be nice if the installer was able to install
AB to any (selectable) disk

I totally agree.
But at the time of AiR-BOOT's inception there were no BIOSses that could swap
disks or select one to boot from. Therefore the 0x80 BIOS boot-disk is kinda
'hard coded' at some places.

To have AiR-BOOT present on other disks and also cope with advanced BIOS features
like swapping disks or booting from specific disks is in the works.

A bottleneck is the limited code space of ~31K with about 100 bytes left when building
the Cyrillic version. If nobody cares about the "Cooper Bars" or other "bling bling"
like audio this could be dropped, freeing up space to implement true enhancements in this
limited space.

I consider this a feature request.

[Allan]

Replying to rousseau:

Replying to yoda:
I consider this a feature request.

Of course it is - it is opened as such (here in TRAC called an enhancement)

While I agree with what you say, I think you misunderstand the problem.

The problem is only the installer - which doesn't give a choice, for which disk
to install it to. It should be simple to make the installer ask the user which
disk he wants it installed to.

There is no need for changes in AB itself. I have managed to install AB to all my 4
disks in the system here, and it worked perfect when I asked BIOS to boot any of them;
but it is not an easy task to do it, and as you know old eCS LVM has a nasty idea about
overwriting MBR on all disks.

That why I would like the AB installer to give us a choice to install it to *all*
disks in system.

As a side note, eCS 2.2 system really should adobt this, instead of IBM's crazy idea of overwriting all MBR's on all disks every time you just change a driveletter somewhere.

[Ben Rietbroek]

I don't misunderstand the problem.

Enabling the installer to install on all disks (or selective others),
would give the user the false impression that AiR-BOOT itself would work
when one of these disks is booted using some advanced BIOS method.

Currently, this is not the case, and that is why this option is not
present yet. AiR-BOOT *does* have to be modified when not booting from
BIOS 80h and that is what is in the works.

That is also why booting AB from USB is not fully supported, because a
USB-stick can be booted from any BIOS; the good, the bad and the ugly.

The fact that you have managed to install AB on your 4 disks highlights
your knowledge and the correct working of your BIOS, which makes the disk
chosen to boot from 80h. Not all BIOSses do that, and one example is using
VirtualBox to boot some other attached disk besides the one on IDE0/master.
AiR-BOOT will not boot because it is not starting from 80h.

Use MiniLVM to change drive-letters, not the Classic CLI or JAVA LVM.

Feedback like yours is very welcome, thank you.

[Allan]

Replying to rousseau:

I don't misunderstand the problem.

Enabling the installer to install on all disks (or selective others),
would give the user the false impression that AiR-BOOT itself would work
when one of these disks is booted using some advanced BIOS method.

Currently, this is not the case, and that is why this option is not
present yet. AiR-BOOT *does* have to be modified when not booting from
BIOS 80h and that is what is in the works.

Well, I have never had this problem with AB

That is also why booting AB from USB is not fully supported, because a
USB-stick can be booted from any BIOS; the good, the bad and the ugly.

I do know, that it doesn't work from USB (tried that too) but BM fails there too.
FreeLDR however, works fine from USB.

The fact that you have managed to install AB on your 4 disks highlights
your knowledge and the correct working of your BIOS, which makes the disk
chosen to boot from 80h.

Well, I just managed to patch AB installer, to install to another disk.
As it is just a one byte patch - I just created 4 copies with disknumber 1-4.
(This is a lot easier than changing BIOS boot order, to get another disk to be
nr 1, so you can use normal installer)

I tested number 4 - the one with the XP partition - and I can now successfully
boot to 4'th disk using AB 1.1.0 and boot to XP (old AB wouldn't boot XP).

So, for my BIOS, only the installer fix is needed.

Use MiniLVM to change drive-letters, not the Classic CLI or JAVA LVM.

I've always done that - the others are horrible :-)

[Ben Rietbroek]

Replying to yoda:

The ability to install AiR-BOOT to other disks is scheduled for v1.1.4.
This ticket will remain open until then.

[Allan]

I didn't see this option in testbuild 1.1.1

[Ben Rietbroek]

And it will not be in v1.1.2, sorry.

[The short answer]
Installing AiR-BOOT on other disks has high priority.

[The longer answer]
The reason is that it involves more than just 'adding some option'.
Where to install AiR-BOOT?
(Remember that the installer is multi-platform and run from the OS)
On a physical disk? (:1,:2,etc)
On the boot-disk? (Which can be different from the AB boot-disk)
What about sticks inserted?

Currently a major 'revamp' under the hood has been done to get
AiR-BOOT in better shape for more modern functionality.
That was phase 1, so to speak.

Personally I also want to be able to install AiR-BOOT on whatever
disk I want, and I also want a version that can boot from FLOP and STICK
a version that can boot from ISO-9660 in emulation and non-emulation
mode. Some more 'sanitizing' is needed for that.
Which will be phase 2, so to speak.

[Phase 3]
The 'AiR-BOOT' name is copyright Martin Kiewitz.
While the code is free, common courtesy requires keeping 'dedication'
messages and whatnot. And it has many limitations, viewed by modern eyes.
Phase 3 will be the implementation of a new boot-loader for OS/2,
having the 'on-the-fly' capabilities of AiR-BOOT, but using none of
its source code while at the same time looking at other areas such as
UEFI, CSM, HW-VIRT, OS/2-LVM, and whatnot.
Could be named 'BareBoot' or 'ArcaBoot', no matter, these are my plans.

AiR-BOOT is free software being developed by a free atom... ;)

Regards,

Ben.

[Ben Rietbroek]

The ability to install AiR-BOOT to other disks is scheduled for v1.1.4.
This ticket will remain open until then.

[Allan]

Replying to rousseau:

And it will not be in v1.1.2, sorry.

[The short answer]
Installing AiR-BOOT on other disks has high priority.

I agree :-)
However, I patched the airboot installer in 1.1.0 and made 4 diff copies,
so each will to disks 1-4. used those again with 1.1.1 bin file, and it worked fine :-)

I see from next comment, that it will be in 1.1.4 - very nice.

[The longer answer]
The reason is that it involves more than just 'adding some option'.
Where to install AiR-BOOT?
(Remember that the installer is multi-platform and run from the OS)
On a physical disk? (:1,:2,etc)
On the boot-disk? (Which can be different from the AB boot-disk)
What about sticks inserted?

I can see your point. At first I just thought of it as a simple parameter
(/1 /2 ...)which is ok just for simple disks. Sticks will make that trickier.

[Phase 3]
The 'AiR-BOOT' name is copyright Martin Kiewitz.
While the code is free, common courtesy requires keeping 'dedication'
messages and whatnot. And it has many limitations, viewed by modern eyes.
Phase 3 will be the implementation of a new boot-loader for OS/2,
having the 'on-the-fly' capabilities of AiR-BOOT, but using none of
its source code while at the same time looking at other areas such as
UEFI, CSM, HW-VIRT, OS/2-LVM, and whatnot.
Could be named 'BareBoot' or 'ArcaBoot', no matter, these are my plans.

Well, that is a lot of things, you want to squezze into MBR, or track 0 :-)
I don't know if OS/2 will ever make it into an UEFI/GPT system, but Graphical
bootmanagers for such systems already exists (open source), and are self discovering
like AiRBoot. For MBR systems - you might simply take over the IBM-bootmanager partitions;
as they are not used anymore, and then there is enough space :-)

Anyway, thanx for letting us hear about what the future might bring us Ben