Boot Manager with EFI partition table support and LVM metadata support

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

For those of you who have been playing with CHKVOL, FORMAT, and VMDISK:

You've had all of the things bar one for running my Boot Manager.
Unless you exercised your curiosity, you maybe didn't realize that you
had a SYS command. That, and two more files, are enough to get you my
Boot Manager. The two additional files are now available at the same
WWW page that you downloaded CHKVOL et al. from. Here's the five-step
procedure to getting a Boot Manager volume on a removable bootable FAT
medium. Notice that Boot Manager doesn't care what the medium is. It
must be directly bootable by the machine firmware (i.e. be a "whole
disc" removable disc, or a primary partition on a non-removable disc).
But other than that it could be a floppy disc or a volume on a removable
memory stick for all that Boot Manager cares.

Notes: For now, the volume must be formatted using the FAT filesystem.
This is a temporary limitation. As far as firmware is concerned, I've
tested this on machines with Phoenix-Award and AMIBIOS firmwares and it
works as designed. Dave Yeo is currently having trouble with another
machine. If you experience an FE01 error, which is a firmware "invalid
parameters" error, you're in the same boat as M. Yeo. We're currently
investigating what is going on with M. Yeo's firmware. You'll find that
the Boot Manager has spat out a load of stuff at you. Let me know the
details via electronic mail.

Another thing that M. Yeo has is discs partitioned with IBM's LVM. Boot
Manager should pull out the partition names from the LVM metadata and
display them. But as noted in a previous message I've added in the IBM
LVM partition table support blind, and, in the absence of documentation
as to the exact algorithm for locating the IBM LVM metadata this might
require some tweaking to cover all possibilities, which of course I
cannot do here without something to test against.

STEP ONE: HIGH-LEVEL FORMAT THE VOLUME AS FAT.

You can format it with my FORMAT. If it's already high-level formatted,
that's alright. But formatting it with my FORMAT will get you a FAT
volume with an extended volume boot record, which is in general the more
robust boot record in the face of things like file fragmentation and so
forth. Note that the disc must already be low-level formatted before
you run FORMAT.

format /v "TAU Boot Manager volume" b:

STEP TWO: PUT THE MINI-FSD AND MICRO-FSD ON IT.

You do this with my SYS.

sys b:

STEP THREE: MAKE THE REQUIRED DIRECTORIES.

The Boot Manager ships as if it is in a \TAU\BootMgr\ directory. In
order to work it must actually be in a \TAU\Boot\ directory.

mkdir b:\tau

mkdir b:\tau\boot

STEP FOUR: COPY THE BOOT MANAGER FILES ON.

Presuming that you've unpacked the Boot Manager into the \TAU\BootMgr\
directory on drive Q:, simply copy the files across.

copy q:\tau\bootmgr\* b:\tau\boot\*

STEP FIVE: CONFIGURATION.

Simply edit the configuration file, b:\tau\boot\bootmgr.cfg, according
to taste. You might even not want to change anything at all.

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

> Notes: For now, the volume must be formatted using the FAT
> filesystem. This is a temporary limitation. As far as firmware is
> concerned, I've tested this on machines with Phoenix-Award and AMIBIOS
> firmwares and it works as designed. Dave Yeo is currently having
> trouble with another machine. If you experience an FE01 error, which
> is a firmware "invalid parameters" error, you're in the same boat as
> M. Yeo. We're currently investigating what is going on with M. Yeo's
> firmware. You'll find that the Boot Manager has spat out a load of
> stuff at you. Let me know the details via electronic mail.
>
> Another thing that M. Yeo has is discs partitioned with IBM's LVM.
> Boot Manager should pull out the partition names from the LVM metadata
> and display them. But as noted in a previous message I've added in
> the IBM LVM partition table support blind, and, in the absence of
> documentation as to the exact algorithm for locating the IBM LVM
> metadata this might require some tweaking to cover all possibilities,
> which of course I cannot do here without something to test against.
>

The world is nipping at M. Yeo's heels. Someone else has just tested
Boot Manager against a disc with the LVM metadata on it, and we've done
the tweaking to locate the partition names properly. (Although coded
blind, there wasn't much to do, apart from fix a wrongly sized field
declaration in a data structure.) I've been sent a screenshot of Boot
Manager correctly displaying the LVM partition names. There were no
FE01 problems, so thus far M. Yeo is still alone in that particular
boat. (-: