> However, I didn't > mark the partition as active (forgot about that), so maybe that is a > required step still. The boot process on an x86 PC goes something like:
. BIOS reads first 512 bytes of the disk (the MBR, which includes the partition table) into memory . BIOS begins execution of the MBR code . MBR checks the partition table to find an active partition . MBR reads the first 512 bytes (bootsector) of that partition into memory . MBR begins execution of the bootsector . bootsector begins execution of the code I may be wrong, but I don't think there is even any requirement to have a partition table on the disk, with a custom bootsector you could do almost anything you want. Fortunately Microsoft still use the MBR and partitions on the boot disk which allows backwards compatibility with everything else. I'm not sure if this is true for 'dynamic disks' under windows though. Anyway, as someone else said I don't think the standard MBR code is smart enough to do anything sane if there is no active partition, which (for once :) is not the fault of Windows. > If I get a chance I'll have to play around with it > some more to see what happens. I for one would be grateful if you could find the time to do this, it would put my lingering doubt to bed too :) Btw, if you use an older version of mkntfs (not sure exactly what version, but I think it's the one still in Debian Etch), you'll get a windows partition that looks perfect but doesn't boot no matter what you do, or at least it didn't boot when I tried it no matter what I did. The current version appears to work fine. Thanks James ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
