Here, the MBR is replaced by BOOTACTV (or any other interactive boot
partition selector) and the choice between Linux and the
other operating system(s) can be made at boot time. This approach should be
used if LILO fails to boot the other operating system(s).
Installation:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/fd/MBR bs=512 count=1"
dd if=bootactv.bin of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1"
Deinstallation:
dd if=/MBR of=/dev/hda bs=446 count=1"
FDISK /MBR" under MS-DOS.
If replacing the MBR appears undesirable and if a second Linux partition exists (e.g. /usr, not a swap partition), BOOTACTV can be merged with the partition table and stored as the ``boot sector'' of that partition. Then, the partition can be marked active to be booted by the DOS-MBR.
Example:
# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hda3 bs=512 count=1 # dd if=bootactv.bin of=/dev/hda3 bs=446 count=1
WARNING: Whenever the disk is re-partitioned, the merged boot sector on that ``spare'' Linux partition has to be updated too.