In which cases one might face problems ?
The following problems affect mostly booting by BIOS. When booting by UEFI many of these problems do not exists.
Disk managers:
This case affects only booting by BIOS.
When disk managers are installed on the first hard disk e.g., the OnTrack or
EZ-Drive disk manager, then an installation of the boot manager Boot-US
to the MBR may cause problems. Typically disk managers are used in older
PCs which are without LBA support for accessing disks larger than 500 MiB. When the
mainboard BIOS supports EIDE disks or offers LBA access disk managers are
usually neither required nor installed.
The incompatibility of a boot manager (when installed on the MBR) with
disk managers has two reasons. Firstly, both programs are installed potentially
on the same sectors, i.e. on the MBR and the beginning of the track 0.
Secondly, when the boot manager Boot-US is installed on the MBR it becomes
active before the disk manager. This means the boot manager is not supported
by the disk manager and therefore the boot manager can access the wrong
sectors of the disk.
When the boot manager is installed on a primary partition the above mentioned problems should
not arise. Here the MBR contains the necessary code to start the
disk manager before the boot manager becomes active, and both programs reside
on different sectors.
ABIT RAID adapters:
The following warning does not apply to the case where the RAID adapter is used
just as a fast IDE channel and no true RAID functions are active. In this case there
are no RAID configuration data which would have to be stored.
If RAID functions are used the corresponding RAID configuration data must not get destroyed,
otherwise, you will not be able to access the data on the RAID disks any more.
It seems that the ABIT UDMA RAID adapter stores its configuration data directly on
user accessible sectors on the hard disk, i.e. on the track 0.
This way of storing the configuration data is extremely unsafe. The data can be easily
overwritten, for example, when the boot manager Boot-US is installed on the MBR,
or when a disk manager is installed on the MBR.
All restrictions and warnings about disk managers also apply to the ABIT RAID adapater.
For example, you must not install the boot manager of Boot-US to the MBR when using
an ABIT RAID adapater.
When the boot manager is installed on a primary partition problems should
not arise.
Complicated configuration:
The following cases are classified as complicated configuration:
- Disk number of boot partition has been changed (BIOS)
- Partitions are booted over several steps
- Partitions are not independent
In such cases you should be careful when you install the boot manager
Boot-US. The boot process differs from the one for which
Boot-US has been designed.
Whne booting by BIOS and the disk number of the boot partition is changed, for example if
a new disk is inserted or removed, it is necessary to take this change into account during the boot process.
The boot manager Boot-US does
contain special support for changing the disk order during the boot process, see
a "second" hard disk, nevertheless problems are conceivable in special cases.
The other problematic case is when more than one partition is involved
in the boot process. When the boot manager is installed care must
be taken that all partitions involved remain visible during the
boot process. The respective operating system
probably will fail to start when one of the start partitions is hidden.
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