Can OSS boot from a Logical partition?

Is OSS able to boot an OS from a logical partition?

I thought I could have 4 primary partitions plus an extended partition on a hard drive so my plan was to have 4 primary boot partitions and then an extended/logical data partition. As it turns out I guess you can have either 4 primary partitions or 3 primaries plus 1 extended (with then of course as many logicals inside the extended) so if I want my 4th boot it will have to on a logical partition.

Can I do that with OSS?

(I don't want to get into having multiple OS's on the same partition.)

Thanks!

 

OSS can boot operating systems from Logical partitions. However, in the case of Windows, they usually must be added manually. If you're mixing Linux and Windows and can keep Windows on Primary partitions, that's probably the easiest as Linux is generally recognized okay on Logical partitions.

 

Thanks again for the info. I added the additional logical partition manually and OSS does transfer to that partition, but I just get an error "A disk read error occurred" and says press CTRL-ALT-DEL to restart.

What I did was after I had set up my main XP partition I ghosted that partition over to the logical one. (I did verify that the Boot.ini file was correct for the parition after Ghosting.)

It works fine if I ghost the original XP partition over to another spare primary partition and boot from it from OSS, but when I ghost to the logical partition and tell OSS to boot from that (via the manual entry in bootwiz.oss) I get the above error.

 

Can you post the BOOTWIZ.OSS file? It might help to see it. Also, a screenshot of your drives from DD in Manual Mode would help.

 

Attached.

The partition higlighted in the screen shot is the one I'm trying to boot to. It's the first logical partition in the extended partition on the first hard drive.

I can boot to the 3 primary partitions all just fine. Everything else with regards to hiding or showing the appropriate parititions for booting from the different boot partitions is working fine. It just won't boot from the logical partition.

I don't think it's an actual OSS issue. I can select the "Windows XP TEST" item and it does attempt to boot, I just get that "A disk read error occurred" message. On a side note, I can unhide the partition using DD and view the files on that partition just fine, so I know the actual file system on that partition is in tact.

Oh, the one thing I wasn't sure of in manually adding the entry to bootwiz.oss for this partition was the "active" flag. Can you set a logical partition as "active"? Though I tried it both with that flag in there for botting this partition and without and same result either way. The bootwiz.oss as attached to this message is without trying to set that partition as active, but of course not hiding it either.

 

The entry you added looks to be correct except I would disable the write_boot option (write_boot="0") since there is no file.

Both the error messages you're getting exist in the standard XP boot sector code. You may need to change the Hidden sectors value for the Logical (XPSystem) partition. Instructions for doing this with DD can be found here.

 

FANTASTIC!! Editing the Hidden Sectors fixed it. Thanks much!!!

What about that question of whether to mark the logical partition Active? It seems to be working without that, but should it be marked Active anyway? Or am I correct that you can't really mark a logical partition as Active? In which case does it matter which of the other primary partitions should be Active (but still hidden) when booting to this logical partition, or just leave as whichever the last primary partition that was booted from as Active?

Thanks again!

 

Don't mark the Logical partition Active. You can leave one of the Primary partitions Active even if it's hidden.