Boot Loaders

That XOSL loader with all success is not much stable and might start to oscillate between GRUB sector and XOSL sector. That is due to the fact that it is inside an extended partition at the beginning of the disk. That is less likely and less devastating if the extended partition was after primary partitions. A good observation is to go to Windows disk manager and delete the extended unstable partition and create a primary partition instead of that and formatted as NTFS. You become surprised that GRUB will disappear and in its place XOSL safely has kept its place at the beginning of hard disk and works perfectly loading any other bootable NTFS partition on the disk. You can open physical disk by a hex editor and see that affirmatively XOSL files still are there un-deleted, and un-touched. It is not at a place that through a simple reformating gets lost. XOSL is a nice small piece of software and can cosily reside at its snugging home that it has built at its installation and you cannot get rid of it that easily. What does it remind, then? This observation gets to the idea by some users that XOSL is a virus software. Well, it is not the case. But study of its source code is useful for people who are learners for developing anti-virus software against boot-sector-residenting malwares.I could sum it up for me that if I use only different flavours of Microsoft operating systems on the same machine it is wise to follow the procedures of Microsoft as they are well documented by Microsoft and if I use UNIX types only or mixed with Windows I can use GRUB. I know that Solaris of Sun Microsystem manages that automatically, if you follow their Big Admin procedure for multi-booting. Remains no place for good old XOSL.

Geometry of Hard Disk

Two weeks I did not write in this Blog. I am preparing a website here. I needed to become used to the Microsoft Office Live tools and editing the files and uploading and changing backgrounds. Now I am smoothly on the track. Hopefully that site includes very interesting pieces regarding hardware and assembly codes and this Blog remains for general tuning of computer and similar ideas. I was talking about the structure of hard disk. Their technology constantly is changing to reduce the size, to reduce access time for retrieving each piece of data, or in other words to increase the speed of data retrieve. At the same time it is desirable to increase the amount of data that one can put on a hard disk. There are also other goals such as reducing the noise created by hard disk and improve its mechanical features such as ambient compatibility and positioning of a working hard disk in different orientations. BIOS of computer and operating system talk with the embedded software of the hard disk and from that point on we do not know how that software handles data that I give to my computer to be saved. Hard disk takes my data and with all honesty keep them and gives them back to me. For that software all of my data are in form of bytes next to each other. It is like the RAM of computer: there is no cylinder or head or anything. From the time of corporate mainframe computers with their stacks of disks we have data organization in form of a three dimensional space. At each point "head" should stop, read the data and after passing certain time move to another point. While moving it cannot read anything. Normally people understand that a cylinder is a solid object. This is not meaning of a cylinder. A cylinder is only the outer surface of a solid cylinder similar to a pipe with no pith. A solid cylinder object is like many pipes, thousands, smaller inside the larger. I can address each pipe or cylinder by counting from the most outer and larger pipe to the most inner narrower pipe. Each disk in our imaginary stack of disks has two sides for putting data: top and bottom. On each side we have an imaginary head. Actually a real hard disk has two disks, called platter with four heads, but these are not our concern. For partitioning practice I assume that I have 128 disks each two heads (two sides), a total of 256 heads. I further assume that the most bottom disk has not a bottom disk and therefore no head. that reduces heads to 255 at the end. Hence, H=255. That gives address to find one side of an imaginary disk. cylinders on each disk can be seen as circular track of a CD ROM. Then I should navigate around over that side. I divide that similar to a pizza or a pie. Normally, you do it by make it half and then half again and further until you get small portions. For hard disk, small portions are called "sector." It is standard to continue to make half until we get 64 sectors; six times halving, one after the other. They are counted from "zero" to 63 included, 64 all together. Hence, S=63. One does not change this default, except to commit him to some adventures not utilizing partitions for daily work. the last thing remains for me to decide that on a specific sector on a specific head how many cylinders, inside each other, I need. With the scheme that I have had so far each of my cylinders contain roughly 8Mb of data. From that I can decide for number of cylinders. For safe experience I never exceed C=1024 cylinder, or around 8Gb. But for real works, I do not care much about these things and allow GParted or Windows or Solaris or other software manage these tasks.

Building ISO Image

By the way I also need two additional files to be available in my custom made GParted.iso. One is memdisk and the other is sbootmgr.dsk. I need these later when I am configuring GRUB tools to access my Linux partition where I have installed GParted. One might be eager to utilize LILO for that. It is another challenge. GRUB install utility, grub-install comes with the GParted "Debian" terminal, but LILO should be worked out by you. XOSL can load both of them if they become configured properly. Now, I should build the ISO back. For that I use completely free ISO creator and burning tools ImgBurn from here . I believe when I use these excellent free tools it is not a bad idea to donate some money to their cause. It keeps the flame alight and is quite encouraging. I do that if I could. The tool "ImgBurn" has different options. We have a folder of GParted and we need an ISO image of it. We select this option from the "ImgBurn" easy select user interface. I should be careful to make the ISO "bootable."

Installing GParted on a Hard Disk Partition

A good drill is to put GParted in some Linux partition flavours. If you can force different operating systems and different partitioning schemes coexist or even symbiosis together and you can do it when you are young then later you can force your dog to sleep on the floor instead of on your bed. Hence, my goal becomes to put XOSL and GParted inside an extended partition and have other operating systems in primary partitions. I am interested in using XOSL as the start menu. One bad thing about XOSL is that you are limited to its GUI. There s no way to edit some script to hack things over it. It is another project to search inside its source documents and find things. It has its own dedicated partitioning system with partition type=78 hex. I still have not tested a second version, XOSL2 (Return of XOSL?). But it has many good things such as destroying booting trace of installed operating systems and taking all activities in its own hands. That eliminate need of editing boot loaders of other operating systems. They do not become aware of each other activation and believe that each one of them is the default active operating system. That encouraged me to work with XOSL until I become convinced that it is becoming obsolete and I need to replace it with some new device such as GRUB or GRUB2 and I am still puzzled with GRUB super CD. You notice that I mean GNU and free software. Otherwise, if one pays he can get consultants come and sort things for his computer. Let me tell you what happened next. I reformatted my extended partition (already I called it "Lab" partition) as again 24Mb of FAT16 logical partition for XOSL and a 300Mb logical for GParted with "ex2" partition type. I left this space bigger than required 120Mb because I want to do some other experiment later. I used GParted latest CD to do that. Gparted includes a command line Linux "Debian" flavour, which is crammed with desired tools for experimenting Unix type of operating systems.

Partitioning My Hard Disk

First I backed up everything from my main hard disks into other hard disks. Then I Downloaded The Gparted Live Iso from here. I can use this user friendly software to create my desired partitions. When you get something from Source Forge downloads it means it is free.I need to convert it to a Live CD. Live means a computer can come to life with this CD without having an operating system. They sometimes use the boring, vague term bootable disk for that. To burn an ISO image I installed the powerful Iso burner, Active@ ISO Burner 2.0 (Freeware), advised by Microsoft knowledge base from here. There are also other free iso burners. I found this with less errors. I burned Gparted on a CD.