[ros-dev] Setup on an extended partition

[João Jerónimo]

On 05-04-2015 09:36, Minas Abrahamyan wrote:
> 3. This feature is extreamely needed for just any real-life (==real 
> hardware) Reactos tester and developer: see p.2 Plus starting from 
> extended partition will allow to have multiple copies of reactos 
> installations, which is bread and water for testers.
> The fact this feature is absent just shows where real-life usage by 
> testers of Ros is: just nowhere.
Hi,

The point here is that what is seen in the project regarding testing is 
that it is supposed to be done in virtual hardware.
Some years ago the project supported "make install", which just created 
the ReactOS folder somewhere in your filesystem, allowing you to copy it 
to your ROS install partition, effectively supporting a form of "manual" 
installation. In those times, I used to test the OS in real hardware, 
something which is much more funny, and much more accurate, than testing 
it in a virtual "machine".

Since then, it became a bit more complicated to test it on real 
hardware, because we never know whether the installer is handling 
partitioning correctly, and one risks screwing the rest of the disk.

Regarding the boot process itself, one can say that "chainloading" 
towards an logical partition is something largely uncommon and 
unsupported. Firstly, only traditional PC OSs (Windows, DOS, perhaps 
OS2?) rely on chainloading to bootstrap, and in those cases (as far as I 
have tested) the chainloading needs to be done in very specific 
conditions (correct sector address in CPU register X, etc, way too 
fragile and non-uniform across OSs) to succeed. Secondly, Linux simply 
ignores the chainloading idea as a boot method completely.
In NTLDR-based kernels, what is done is that the part of the boot 
process that relies on chainloading (i.e. NTLDR) must be in a primary 
(and active?) partition, so you still need a primary partition, even if 
the rest of the OS is in a logical partition.

JJ