Re: ATA 4 KiB sector issues.

[Michal Soltys]

Tejun Heo wrote:
> I was thinking about testing XP booting this weekend but really want
> to avoid it, so thanks a lot for the info.  I'll update the doc
> accordingly but can you please enlighten me on how it works and what's
> broken in detail?  So, XP should be fine with any alignment?
>
> Thanks.

Sorry for late reply.

s/sp2/sp3 - although it shouldn't make a difference from sp2 onwards.

Anyway - the tests I did were because of weird laptop, where I shrinked 
whole win7 stuff and having no primary partitions left to use, I tested 
my usual windows xp installation I deploy with ntfsclone. Originally 
that XP were installed from installation disk merged with sp3 (or how 
it's usually called in windows world - slipstreamed). Of course, 
windows xp itself will not present any options to install itself into 
logical partition in the usual way - but during later deployment it's not 
a problem to put it where one's want.

It's possible that this wouldn't work, if windows were installed first 
from pre-sp2 media, and then service pack was installed (in such case, 
ntldr in C:\ is not updated afaik). It's also possible, that "brute-force" 
copied pre-sp2 or win2k to a partition made with either - a) xp sp2+'s disk 
manager or b) mkfs.ntfs and with updated most recent ntldr -  would boot as 
well (the partition requirement is due to potential differences between the code 
in bootsector, or more precisely - $Boot - first 8KiB of ntfs partition).

Obvious requirements besides the above (ntldr, perhaps $Boot as well) are:

- mentioned "hidden sectors" (must be manually adjusted, recent syslinux's 
chain.c32 has option to do it automatically)
- adjusted boot.ini (to point to new partition, eventually other windowish 
stuff as necessary)

As you can see, there're many "if"s and combinations here that I didn't test.

On a related note - ironically, while I had 0 problems making it work 
through syslinux (both regular chaining and through direct ntldr loading) - 
I couldn't make win7's bootmgr (bcd, bcdedit ....) do it properly. Oh well.

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