Author Topic: volume/partition precedence issue with multiple installed loaders  (Read 3183 times)

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tempolo

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Suppose I have a PC with a working boot loader and OS X partition on its internal drive.
The disk uses MBR partition scheme, meaning that the Extra folder is located on the OS X volume.

Now, suppose something is wrong with the setup in that Extra folder, e.g. a bad extension is installed there, causing trouble, or the Boot.plist is bad.

So, I thought: I'll simply install another boot loader and Extra folder onto a separate disk (i.e. a USB memory stick), tell the PC BIOS to boot from that external disk, and once that disk's boot loader comes up, I choose to continue booting from the PC's OS X partition.

Now here's what I hoped would happen but which didn't:

I expected that the boot loader would take the files from the Extra folder on the USB stick. But instead, it took those from the OS X partition, running in the badly configured Extra folder again.

I thought this was a valid expectation because as long as the OS X partition has no Extra folder and boot loader installed yet, the Extra folder from the USB stick will be used. Secondly, as a general rule, the order to precedence should always be to prefer the more specific (here: USB stick where I explicitly start up from) over the more general (the default on the booted OS X volume), agreed?

So, what I'm asking here: Is there a way to set up the USB stick so that its Extra folder precedes or replaces the one on the destined OS X boot volume? If not, would a feature request for this make sense?
« Last Edit: June 17, 2009, 04:14:17 PM by tempolo »

zef

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Re: volume/partition precedence issue with multiple installed loaders
« Reply #1 on: June 17, 2009, 04:46:57 PM »
Our original intention was to have precedence of the selected boot volume's Extra extensions over your boot partition. With this approach you can use your OS specific extensions on the given volume. On the other hand, it would be handy to be able to modify the precedence order and/or an option to ignore the selected volume's Extra extensions.
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tempolo

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Re: volume/partition precedence issue with multiple installed loaders
« Reply #2 on: June 17, 2009, 06:37:25 PM »
With this approach you can use your OS specific extensions on the given volume
But if I wanted that, I'd just put no Extra folder onto the USB stick I'm start up from, or leave it empty, or anything like that.

But anyway - I'll file a feature request in the forum.