Newbie question

[mmutoo]

Hi all, and thanks Elmar for the great job you have done with plop!
I am new to the world of linux, and it is for a few days that I am trying to learn about multiboot process and find a good boot manager. Honestly, grub is too complicated for me now. May be in the future
Anyways, here is the question (all this story is going on a Virtual Machine BTW):

1) Does plop supports booting from OS's installed on logical partitions? If yes, how many? Since I saw Elmar said on a post that it is possible just for the first logical partition (by OS I mean Linux). I do not remember if he said it is grub problem or plop!

2) I have a 10 GB HDD. I have partitioned it as follows: hda1 (Primary), hda2 (Primary), hda3 (extended), hda5 (logical, inside hda3). Then I installed Bodhi Linux 1.3 on hda5 (boot loader on hda5 also). Plop comes up on boot. I setup a profile for bodhi. In linked partitions list, there are 16 rows. I chose the 3rd (which should be HDA3). Then set it as boot, and used L1 as the logical partition for it. After all, when I try to boot it, I see an error says no valid boot sector. Am I missing something?

3) Could you please direct me to a good tutorial for setting the liked partitions section? I do not get the logic behind it. Why I can choose HDA1 in the second row which should be associated with HDA2 for example?

Many thanks.

[Elmar]

hi,

1) Does plop supports booting from OS's installed on logical partitions? If yes, how many? Since I saw Elmar said on a post that it is possible just for the first logical partition (by OS I mean Linux). I do not remember if he said it is grub problem or plop!

yes, up to 4
but cascaded logical partitions a not supported. for example parted/gparted are creating cascaded logical partitions. in this case you can use only the first logical partition (L1)

2) I have a 10 GB HDD. I have partitioned it as follows: hda1 (Primary), hda2 (Primary), hda3 (extended), hda5 (logical, inside hda3). Then I installed Bodhi Linux 1.3 on hda5 (boot loader on hda5 also). Plop comes up on boot. I setup a profile for bodhi. In linked partitions list, there are 16 rows. I chose the 3rd (which should be HDA3). Then set it as boot, and used L1 as the logical partition for it. After all, when I try to boot it, I see an error says no valid boot sector. Am I missing something?

the configuration should be correct. did you install grub to hda5?

btw, why do you use the extended? you can have 4 primary partitions.

and with the profiles you can use many more (but always only 4 at once).

3) Could you please direct me to a good tutorial for setting the liked partitions section? I do not get the logic behind it. Why I can choose HDA1 in the second row which should be associated with HDA2 for example?

Many thanks.

HDA1 is only the name of the partition, but the partition dont have to be on the first place in the partition table. you can set it the 2nd, 3rd and 4th place. depending on what you want.

example:
one winxp is on the first partition
another xp is on the second partition

the boot.ini of both xp's are configured to boot from the first partition. so the profile of the first win xp has the configuration that its partition is set as first partition.

the profile for the second partition sets also its partition to the first place. remember it was the second partition and now we make it to the first partition. -> the boot.ini dont has to be modified.

do you understand? you can play around and set the partitions to the place in the partition table that you need. as long as your operating system is configured correct you can do what you want. (for dos is only the boot flag important)

best regards
elmar

[mmutoo]

Hi Elmar. You are great and really quick

1) Sorry, this cascade partition stuff is like chinese for me, I do not understand it. I have to study it! However, does parted/gparted support an option for whether making logical partitions cascade or not? Or it just does it and there is no way to change that?

2) In Q2 I made a mistake about the names of the partitions. They should be sda1 ... sda5 and not hda1 ... hda5. However, I think you got the point. What I did was, when I was installing Bodhi, I chose the option for "Do something else", then I chose sda5 from the list of partitions and formatted the partition as ext3 and mounted it as root. On the boot loader options, I chose sda5 (which means grub goes on sda5) and installed Linux. Did what I do was correct?

Note: I am not sure if bodhi uses Grub or Grub2. But if you know that I need to do more config for Grub2, I can go check if it uses Grub2 or not. In distrowatch.com the version for bodhi grub is 1.98 which AFAIK is Grub not Grub2.

3) That is so cool!

Thanks