Logical Partitions: PLoP boots only from L1

[clavi]

Hello,

first of all, thank you for your wonderful program!!!

My problem:
From primary partitions and from L1 in the extended partition everything works as it should.
But from L2, L3 and L4 I only get a blinking Cursor in the upper-left corner of the screen.

I tried on two Machines (Laptop and Desktop), and with various partition-numbers, -sizes, and -orders.

Also I wonder why there are only 4 logical partitions supported?
As far as I know, there can be up to 24 logical partitions per extended partition, right?

Any suggestions?

Greetings, Clavi.

[Elmar]

hi,
what operating system are you trying to boot? if you use grub on the extended partitions then you have to know that grub will work only on the first extended partition.

regards
elmar

[clavi]

On the Laptop I tried Vista SP2, Syslinux (for Universal Boot CD), and an formatted but otherwise empty partition.

On the Desktop I tried Syslinux, and an empty partition.

In case of the empty partition, shouldn't it say something like "no operating system found"?
(At least it does it when trying to boot it from primary partitions or from L1)

But anyway, it should at least have worked with Vista on the Laptop, right?

(To me it looks as if (the beginning of) L2, L3, and L4 are not found in the first place.)

Clavi

[Elmar]

i never tried to boot a windows from an extended partition.

In case of the empty partition, shouldn't it say something like "no operating system found"?

it can only say "no valid boot sector", but when you formated the partition, then you have a valid boot sector. it does not matter if there is an operating system installed or not.

[clavi]

I did some further testing on my desktop:

I formatted a primary partition (P1) and the first two logical partitions in the extended partition (L1, L2) with FAT32, NTFS, and Ext2.
When trying to boot these partitions with PLoP, P1 and L1 always gave identical results:
FAT32: "Non systemdisk..." (Message appeared after PLop)
NTFS: "NTLDR is missing..." (Message appeared after PLop)
Ext2: "***warning*** No valid Bootsector..." (Message appeared within PLop)

In all three cases L2 resulted in a blinking cursor with no message at all!
(btw: this is the same I get, if no L is specified for the extended partition)

So I still believe, L2 is just not found somehow.

Or maybe you could give me a test scenario, where I can check if L2 can be found in principal?

Thanks a lot,
Clavi.

[Elmar]

you are right, there was a bug with L2 and above. i fixed it, please try it
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagerdl.html

regards
elmar

[clavi]

YES!!!   It works!!!   

Thank you so much!!!

One last Question:
Why are only 4 logical Partitions supported?
(Any chance you will change that to a higher number? Maybe 9?)

regards
clavi

[Elmar]

if you have more than 4 logical partitions in an extended partition, then the extended partition gets a new extended partition to get space for more logical partition entries. and this cascade continues. it would be possible to support this, but its not planed to implement it.

regards
elmar

[clavi]

I understand. (I think;)

Anyway, thank you very much again!

regards
clavi

[SPo]

Hi,

i use a very similar configuration: i want to boot from as much Win2K partitions as possible.

Therefore i installed one win2k on a primary partition on a temporary installation drive.
I created on another drive an extended partition with 3 Win2k copies of the working installation from installation drive.
I installed plop  5.0.12 and tested the actual plpbt-5.0.13-test5, too.

I setup a partition in plop and configured 3 profiles. Each profile gets a bootable partition L1 to L3 and is marked bootable. All other entries in the profile are set to clear, because i don`t wanna see other partitions if i booted into one system.

I am able to boot from partition L1, but not from L2 and L3. I get always the error for L2 and L3:
warning no valid bootsector signature

I checked the signature of the bootsectors from L2, L3 and i got 0x55AA with tools from partition magic. So it should work....

Am i doing something wrong ?

Kind regards,

SPo

[Elmar]

how did you create the extended and its logical partitions?

[SPo]

Hi & thanks for the fast reply,

i created the partitions and duplicated the win2k primary partition with Parted v6.6 from the actual UBCD.

Kind regards,

SPo

[Elmar]

maybe parted creates extended partitions in extended partitions. this is not supported by the 5.0.x versions of the plop boot manager.

restart from the beginning and remove the complete extended partition. create one logical partition and restore w2k there. then boot w2k and create the 2 other logical partitions. w2k should not create such cascaded extended partitions (if it does, then you have to create the logical partitions with the classic fdisk tool of linux). restore w2k to the other 2 logical partitions.

[Dan]

You might want to try fixparts:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/fixparts/index.html

[SPo]

Could you recommend a GUI based partitioning tool which does not create nested extended Partitions ?

Kind Regards, SPo