phhpro wrote:My test box is a semi-historic Dell Latitude D 620,
I am familiar with it. My daughter has one and I use to have a D 4xx something.
I won't argue about GRUB, simply because it's a rather religious topic. If you are happy using it, fine. Just make sure to know how it works; and the pitfalls it provides.
I don't know about GRUB, I've never experienced it, but Grub4DOS is actively being maintained and updated.
Moreover, beginning with Vista, they have changed the internal structure. The actual boot loader is now placed in a hidden partition of its own, at the very beginning of the disk.
I think it depends on who does the installation. That's true on my netbook but not true on the desktop that I installed Win 7 on.
IIt's not helping GRUB, and some other tools even find it impossible to work around.
Grub4DOS can find anything on any partition. The exception being the new Windows 8 UEFI systems, they need the BIOS config changed before Grub4DOS can work.
But well, you said, you were running Porteus off a USB? Hm, then why would you need GRUB; or any other boot manager; in the first place?
Because all my USB drives and harddrives are configured to be multi-bootable. BartPE, PartedMagic, Windows Recovery, hdd Windows XP, hdd Windows 7, Porteus 1.2, 2.1, 3.0.
Booting off external media is completly independent of what may live on either internal, or externl storage devices, like a typical hard disk.
Not in my experience. Booting a USB system that doesn't support SATA drives, like BartPE, can hang the boot process before getting to the desktop.
BTW I think
fanthom's proposed "debug" change for
Porteus 3.0 rc2 is what is needed. I implemented something similar that he proposed for me for 2.1 but wasn't sure how to use the sh option to capture what I was seeing.
BTW2 Happy New Year.