Windows the Boot

Yeah, Windows sucks. It is truly awful. But a necessary evil for myself and many others.

One of the suckiest things is how it refuses to accept that there can be in existence any other operating systems in the world but itself.

So I have a PC, and had a Windows and Linux install for some time running together, with grub in the MBR handling the booting both Linix and Windows. Or at least passing booting off to ntldr to bring windows up. No problem.

But then I wanted to reinstall Windows in another partition. It is always good to do a reinstall of Windows into a fresh partition so that you can copy over bits and pieces of the old install as you need them (notably stuff in the Application Data folder in your profile). So it was time. My Windows installation had gotten slow and bloated after only six months, as I randomly install software to make the experience more palatable. My new strategy was to run everything from Linux primarily, and do Windows stuff from a windows VM on my server, and just use native Windows for games.

I did try and use VM Server as a way of reinstalling Windows into the partition without having to leave Linux, by creating a partition based disk for the vm. VM Server reports that the partition table is invalid if you do this on my install. There are a few people who have experienced this before, but none seemed quite the same as mine, and I didn't get to the bottom of it.

So it was time for a native install. So a PC fairly useless while Windows gets on with copying itself. Except it didn't work. This was new - most of the problems you get with Windows I have encountered one time or another but this one I hadn't seen.

The CD would boot, and do the "Checking Hardware configuration" message that precedes the blue install screen, but it never got to the blue. It just cleared the screen and hung.

So.. a bit of a googling (sorry Google for using your name as a verb, but seriously, it is one now) and I discover that Windows XP install will not work if there is a boot sector that it doesn't know. Ie, if there is one present, and it isn't a Windows one. Either that or the partition tables aren't aligned the way it expects.

So a bit of monkeying around later - reorganising the partitions in a way that I did not want, and having to boot the disk with no hard drives connected, I finally got Windows installed. Of course my boot sector is now trashed with the Windows one instead of grub.

But clearly putting grub back is only going to give me problems next time I want to wipe windows.

The good news is that you can boot Linux - essentially chain grub - from NTLDR - the windows boot manager. There are a stack of articles about it around, and from my experience GRLDR doesn't work - this is the grub4dos boot manager that should be able to read and process a standard menu.lst file. The documentation is erratic, and says that it must on the boot drive, but cannot be on ntfs. Not sure how you resolve that if your boot drive is ntfs.

So the other way is to get a copy of the grubbed boot sector, make a file out of it, put it in the root of your boot drive, and just add it to boot.ini.

You need to understand which is your boot drive. In my case grub was installed in the MBR of the primary disk /dev/hda. After all this stuffing around, that had been wiped, so I reinstalled it into another drive:


# grub
grub> root (hd0,7)
grub> setup (hd0,7)


This will install grub into /dev/hda8 (the eighth partition of the first ide drive - grub itself numbers partitions from zero). If your first drive is SATA, then this may refer to /dev/sda

Now make a copy of the first 512 sectors:


dd if=/dev/hda8 of=linux.boot bs=512 count=1


Copy this to your primary Windows partition - wherever boot.ini resides (usually c:\). Then edit boot.ini and put in the line:


c:\linux.boot="Linux"


Reboot, and this will appear in the standard boot menu for Windows.

Sabayon

Sabayon linux is an interesting distro. It is based on Gentoo, which is a favorite of many, but seeks to eliminate some of the compilation hassle of Gentoo by providing a live CD and an installer that installs precompiled packages.

A desktop Gentoo install would be up and running in a day or so, whereas you can get Sabayon installed and running as quickly as any other distro - the install time is a function of the number of packages you install.

So how does it work in real life? Well, installation is indeed a breeze - using the mini-CD option you are up and running in no time.

The mini-CD has a subset of the full Sabayon install DVD, which comes in at 3.3 gigs. The Sabayon team say that they have eliminated all the "useless" things to make the mini version. These useless things are presumably included on the DVD.

So once you have installed, you will want to add a few of your own packages. And this is where things get interesting. Firstly Sabayon has a release schedule, and an existing Sabayon installation can be upgraded to the new release, though only those packages that are part of the distro. I would imagine this would often cause non-Sabayon packages to break.

However, if you are a happy to manage this, then install some extras. But this is where things get tangled. For example, it is recommended that an

emerge --sync
layman -S
emerge --newuse --update --deep world

is performed to get everything up to date. This is pretty important as anything you want to install over and above standard Sabayon, is likely have library version dependencies that are not met by the install disk libraries.

So what happens here in effect is that everything in standard install is almost immediately replaced by updated and recompiled versions. And something is bound to want to look at the kernel in /usr/src/linux, so you had better put one there. And build it. And then install it (thankfully Sabayon does provide the .config file for the default kernel in /proc/config.gz). But the whole point of Sabayon is to not have to do this... I had around 6 gigs of downloads once I had updated everything.

But then there is something else Sabayonic that comes into play. Sabayon states that it is cutting edge - and it is - it comes with late release nvidia and ati drivers, and aiglx, xgl and beryl are there out of the box. But in order to be cutting edge, masked packages need to be accepted.

Masked packages are flagged with ~amd64 or ~x86 depending on your architecture. These are packages that have not been fully tested and so it is up to you if you want to risk installing them.

A sabayon default installation has "ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~amd64" in make.conf, which means that it will emerge anything in testing. This is how it achieves cutting edge-ness. But obviously not everything in testing will work - thats the whole point of testing it. So the emerge will fail on various packages, which will cause you to try and find a path through the dependencies that will allow everything to work - by managing what goes into /etc/portage/package.mask. This is pretty difficult.

And it seems to me that it is impossible to go back to not bring in untested packages. Well, not impossible, but hard. The keyword can be switched off, but then everything needs recompilation. But some of the libraries cannot be downgraded - you are warned that downgrading will break the system - like glibc.

So anything that relies on a library that is currently in testing cannot be downgraded must by definition be an "in-testing" package. So trying to unravel the dependency web is intractable.

Having gentoo on the desktop is pretty cool, and Sabayon does a good job of getting you there - but the nature of gentoo is that you are compiled to your architecture, so having precompiled binaries doesn't give you any of the benefits that gentoo is about - except emerge's excellent dependency management. But that demands that you recompile everything, which then makes Sabayon redundant.

Perhaps the better approach would be to install vanilla gentoo, then use layman to bring in the sabayon overlay, and use the Sabayon part of the portage tree to bring beryl and all the extra goodies that make Sabayon worthwhile.

The Bank Counter-Conspiracy....

Hello. If you work at a bank, please look away now. This information is not for you.

We are all aware, to some degree, that the worlds banks are conspiring against us in order to extract as much money as they can for us.

I can now reveal a conspiracy that you can be part of against the banks. Here it is. Take a look at one of your many credit cards. Now turn it over and observe the signature strip... notice how narrow it is? Try writing on it... notice how it seems to repel most ordinary forms of pen delivered ink?

Now this is probably something you have known in the back of your mind for many years - since you sent off your first credit card application and got your sweaty credit virgin hands on a plastic rectangle that was your ticket to free money. All you had to do was turn it over and sign on the... d'oh! The strip is too small for any reasonable signature and damn it, none of these pens leave a mark. You probably put this down to early inexperience and let it fester into a growing feeling of inadequacy as you grew through credit filled life.

Well, it doesn't have to be that way. There are millions like you. Billions. In fact, here is the kicker: Most people on the planet are aware that credit card signature strips are hopeless for recording signatures. It isn't just you.

The truth is, the only people on the planet that do not know this fact are those working in the bank and credit industries. This is the one morsel of information that we have and they don't. Huzzah! Please don't tell them.