Foo - Does such a bootloader exist?

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phantomcow2
06-08-06, 05:27 PM
Just curious here.
Does such a bootloader exist in which at first it looks like the regular XP boot procedure but if you press a certain key, perhaps F12, Linux would load? Could such a thing be created?

catatonic
06-08-06, 05:45 PM
HUZZAH!

http://jaeger.morpheus.net/linux/ntldr.html


note that this uses NTLDR, which is the menu you see when you have multiple versions of windows installed.
jfmckenna
06-09-06, 09:13 AM
^^ That still requires you to have to select an OS from a menu and hit enter rather then just hit a key to boot an OS. I am not sure about this but I would be curious if you ever figure it out. You probably would have to reprogram your BIOS so that upon POST you can hit a key much like you would do to enter into your BIOS menus.

TexasGuy
06-09-06, 10:43 AM
Can't grub or lilo do that? I'ts been years since i played around with it.
jschen
06-09-06, 10:48 AM
Ever considered running some virtualized boxes rather than having to reboot over and over into different OSes? Run VirtualPC, Qemu, Parallels Workstation, or any of a number of other choices to have your other OSes running whenever you please. Run whatever OS you need the most processing power on as your primary OS. And as a side benefit, your guest OSes that you run on virtual boxes can have saved states. So for example, you could save a Linux box at a certain point (including saving your virtual hard drive's state), go mess around with it, and then if you decide you don't like the changes, have it revert to the previous state.
khuon
06-10-06, 01:57 AM
Not sure if one is available for linux but the stock-standard plain-vanilla boot0 MBR bootloader for FreeBSD does this although the OS is usually mapped starting from F1. What you could do is just install FreeBSD's bootloader into a small boot partition (without the rest of FreeBSD) and have it just configured to boot Windows and Linux.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/boot-blocks.html

The easiest way to do this is to burn a FreeBSD LiveCD, boot the installer and have it boot into the LiveCD. You can then issue the proper fdisk(8) command to install the MBR and use boot0cfg(8) to configure it.