falemagn wrote:
Thanks, your effort is very much appreciated :-)
Well, I'm a crap coder so I should make myself useful somehow! ;-)
The results are in and it's bad news I'm afraid :-( I managed to recreate the conditions which stopped AROS booting, and it still affects the 25th November build. I've got the latest (26th) downloading now, will test it in the next hour (I have replace the machine's FDD first because of a freak accident I've just had.)
I think I've narrowed it down somewhat though. This is the order I did things in:
Installed QNX, made a BeOS partition and a FAT32 partition. Put WinME on the FAT32 partition so I could install BeOS from Windows, installed BeOS, then Mandrake Linux. At this point AROS is still booting from CD with no trouble. However Mandrake's LILO overwrites QNX's boot selector and I couldn't for the life of me get LILO to boot QNX or BeOS (although it would boot Windows.)
This is where Smart Boot Manager came in. When you install SBM in the drive's MBR, it keeps the original MBR someplace (is there room in the MBR for both?? I don't know but it's all I can think of...) so that if you choose 'Previous MBR' at the boot selection screen, LILO comes up and you can load Linux.
As soon as SBM's installed, the AROS CDs won't work.
You can find SBM
here.
Hope this helps in some way :-)