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Vintage Computers Any vintage computer systems, calculators, video games etc., but with an emphasis on 1980s and earlier equipment.

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Old 13th Dec 2016, 9:04 pm   #1
GMB
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Default PC - Booting from an explicit device

Does anyone know some kind of boot loader thing that would just do the very simple thing of, having booted itself, just ask what device and partition I want to try to boot from and then just do it?

I am currently dicing with death on a old laptop that has got its grubby boot loader in a mess thanks to the stupidity of the various partitioning tools.
One more slip and it will be toast. Before I dive in any further to rescue the situation I really need to know I have a fall-back position. There are lots of partitions that have various systems on them. All I want to be able to do is without help from any particular system or filestore to just be able to get something to boot the system off partition number N off device X.
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Old 13th Dec 2016, 9:24 pm   #2
OscarFoxtrot
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

Depends how old a PC and what mechanism it uses for bootloading.

You can put Grub on a USB -- if you can boot from USB -- and proceed from there.

https://www.pendrivelinux.com/instal...-ubuntu-linux/
http://askubuntu.com/questions/18002...-a-rescue-disk

Indeed you can have the full Linux operating system run from USB (or even, rather more slowly, from a read-only CD-ROM or DVD-ROM) and specific rescue distros are available.


1. for modern motherboards that run on UEFI in full UEFI mode. This is usually the case for computers that were sold with a pre-installed Windows 8.x or 10.
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/6

2. for motherboards that run on a conventional old-fashioned BIOS. This usually means a computer that was sold with Windows Vista or Windows XP pre-installed on it, or a motherboard that runs on an (U)EFI that has been configured to behave as if it were a conventional old-fashioned BIOS. This is normally the case for a computer that was sold with a pre-installed Windows 7.
https://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxtipsproject/grub

full tutorial on Grub
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/grub-2.html

Dual booting Windows and *nix
http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/d...-7-ubuntu.html
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Old 13th Dec 2016, 9:27 pm   #3
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

"grub" will list the various bootable-devices/partitions it finds, and let you choose the one to go for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GRUB

I use it here to choose between three versions of Linux or an old legacy Win8 install.
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Old 13th Dec 2016, 9:49 pm   #4
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

Plop boot manager may help: https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html
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Old 13th Dec 2016, 10:04 pm   #5
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

I am familiar with GRUB but I am not aware of how it can be made to list what it finds. That is actually my problem.

As far as I can see it reads a list of stuff from grub.cfg (IF it can find that) and if that happens to be right then it might do something useful.

I am now not sure what it exactly does do because the wheels started coming off when I couldn't find a way to get a partition added at the start of the extended chain. The effect of that was that it lost the .cfg file because all the partitions had been renumbered when a partition was deleted. I found a way to manually argue with it so I found it the old cfg file - and amazingly that worked OK in spite of having the wrong partition addresses in it.

Worryingly the cfg file lives in a little partition that one system mounts as /boot. I am not at all sure what would happen if I tried to update this system, or another Linux system it has.

(My nerves on this stuff are especially shot due to recent experience of installing a new Linux on another laptop. I found that several of the Debian-related distros all suffered the same problem - that grub (now grub2) was missing from the install disc! I eventually found that the only way to install these (new) systems is to be connected to the net and select the option "update as we install" so it finds it online. I guess the authors haven't tried not-having a network that works.)
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Old 14th Dec 2016, 8:53 am   #6
Karen O
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

My late partner used to bring old laptops back from the dead using something called a RIS server. Apparently, many computers support RIS (remote install service?) and can have complete operating systems installed through their network socket.
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Old 14th Dec 2016, 9:14 am   #7
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

As mentioned above, you can run Linux from a CD. Many Linux distros come on a bootable CD which you can use to evaluate the OS without making any changes to what's installed on the hard disk. You can boot from the CD and mend what's already installed on the hard disk if you know all the relevant commands.

It sounds like you already have Grub. Grub should configure itself when it is installed. Then during booting it gives you a list of bootable partitions to choose from. The only exception is if there is only one partition. Modern verions of Grub will just boot in that case and you have to hold shift during the boot process to access the menu. If you boot into rescue mode then one of the options should be to reinstall Grub.
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Old 14th Dec 2016, 11:01 am   #8
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

Personally, I would take a snapshot of the 'whole' disk. In my experience there is no universal foolproof way of booting an 'older PC', when there is more than 1 drive, as the mapping of drives was not well defined between different BIOS manufacturers. The usual symptom of this is the boot loader starts up but it can't find what it is trying to boot, even if it is actually on the same drive that the boot loader came from!

dc
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Old 14th Dec 2016, 11:43 am   #9
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

That's the safest way. Take the disk out, connect it up to a PC and copy all the data over. Then you can work on the laptop disk without risking losing the data. Personally I would just get another disk for the laptop and do a fresh install. That way if you do forget to back up a directory you still have the original disk with the data on.
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Old 14th Dec 2016, 6:02 pm   #10
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

Yes, but it takes hours and hours these days. I was trying to avoid having to do that.

Another wretched problem I have is that none of the partition tools I have found can do the really simple thing of moving unused space at the start of the extended partition to be before the extended partition start (i.e. move the start boundary up). I will do it with a hex editor if I must.

Reason (in case you wonder) is that the Windows install has run out of space - something that it doesn't like. The space is available if the stupid partition tools would just make use of it without copying gigabytes of data back and forth (and sometimes that isn't so easy as you then hit bad sectors that are not being used).
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Old 14th Dec 2016, 8:49 pm   #11
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

If you are using grub you can update it and it will list and offer at boot all it finds. In Debian Linux I think as root it's simply 'update grub' in terminal. When I've been playing and reinstalling and mucked up booting it's got me out a mess a few times. You have to have all the partitions mounted for them to be discovered.
I've never found gparted lacking in anything I've done. If it fails to do what I ask then I'm usually asking for something I shouldn't. If you are resizing and moving partitions then BACKUP. You have been advised.
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Old 14th Dec 2016, 9:13 pm   #12
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

I was nervous about reloading grub in case the result was bad. My concern was that the /grub directory is on a different partition to the main Linux system and I wasn't sure if I had to specify something to maintain this state of affairs.
This is typical of Linux stuff - I couldn't find anything that would tell me what state we were in. They were happy to do "something" but no way to be sure it was OK.

It would be nice to upgrade the grub program itself but it won't be as easy as usual. The Ubuntu system (not that old I think) annoyingly sticks up a dialog (that won't close) saying that this version of Ubuntu is no longer supported so I am stuffed on using the package manager. Thanks for that Ubuntu.
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Old 16th Dec 2016, 4:49 pm   #13
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

IF it's a very old PC, Win 3 or DOS (somewhere in region of 5-6), then IF you can find a copy of an old Norton Program ( on Norton Utilities 4.5, but it's at least 25-30 years old) called BE, you can set up a boot up program using this , with a menu on screen, (in a .BAT file, run from a line in Autoexec.bat) and in the command lines use normal dos commands to jump from menu to various drives & programs.
Program language is like a mix of DOS & Basic .
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Old 16th Dec 2016, 8:05 pm   #14
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

Quote:
Originally Posted by Oldcodger View Post
IF it's a very old PC, Win 3 or DOS (somewhere in region of 5-6), then IF you can find a copy of an old Norton Program ( on Norton Utilities 4.5, but it's at least 25-30 years old) called BE....
Be warned though that many such historic 'partition magic' or 'boot manager' type programs can have issues with 'large' hard-drives (anything over 80Gb or made this century!) and/or anything-not-formatted-as-FAT/FAT32.
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Old 16th Dec 2016, 10:37 pm   #15
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Default Re: PC - Booting from an explicit device

I last used my ( sitting on an old IDE HDD ) version of Norton utilities 4.5 on last mother board ( FOXCONN)running W2K on a 80GB HDD. I've found it ran (with degrees of success ,depending on how new the MB/OS was ) ,from, an old PC in the days of low DOS versions ,and equally well on an old laptop, which barely ran W95 to last MoBo, which could run W10( never tried it on W10).
As said- it ran on a 40MB FAT formatted HDD / PC on ? DOS 6 circa 1992, my old Laptop with FAT HDD (500MB) and on other systems ( including an old W2K /10GB fat 32 HDD) all the way to last MoBo and up to 80GB HDD.
So ,that's a time span of 30 years and from FAT 16 to at most (possibly )XP, and HDD from 40 MB to 320 GB. ( On W2K with larger drives, I had to install the large drive MS fix).

I've still got an old Intel 66MHZ system kicking around, and DOS 6 on file. One of these
days, I'll stick in a clean HDD, set up a menu in BE and see what's left on some of my old floppies /clean them up and put it on CD.
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